Last two weeks (8-23 November 2012) was really exhausting, first Gerrit User Summit and Hackathon in Google HQ, then on Thursday (22nd November) Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan.

First things first: Gerrit User Summit.

This was two-day event in one of Google’s training center. I was really impressed how vibrant Gerrit community is; to be honest I didn’t expect so may people attending to this event and be so active during presentations. There was people not only from Android-oriented companies but also organizations like WikiMedia and hardware companies like Qualcomm or Garmin. First User Summit day includes presentations about server side plugins and improvements in Gerrit 2.5. Second day was mostly occupied by Prolog presentations, I’m really impressed how powerful Prolog rules are and now they can customize Gerrit workflow (eg. you can force at least two +1 votes before change can be submitted, or prevent author from submitting his own change or choose another submit type base on branch name). This day also includes my presentation about Web UI plugins. I’ve presented how simple it is to generate stub GWT and JavaScript based plugin projects, then how easily they can be build and deployed in Gerrit. Currently UI plugis are pretty limited, they can be loaded into UI and say ‘hello’, nothing more but IMO this is good starting point to further development. My slides can be found here.

Then Gerrit Hackathon begins.

Up to 15 persons was hacking Gerrit starting from 12th November. Most of them was focused on improving existing UI and extending its functionality. Useful features were added like:

• editing topic branch name and commit message in place,
• configurable dashboards,
• customizable top level menus,
• file level comments

were added. Gerrit get also new white look and feel and most of GWT RPC services was rewritten to be REST. My personal focus was on auth-plugins and together with Colby Ranger (Google) and Luca Milanesio (GerritForge) was working on this topic. During first two days we manage to come with draft API and first prototype implementation for handling authentication during git clone commands (using HTTP and SSH protocols). Then move to porting LDAP based authentication and switching Web UI interface to new implementation, unfortunate this appear to be not so easy. Couple hours before hackathon ends we presented hackish implementation that works (in our simple use case) now we need to polish it and make workable for all different kind of use cases 😉

I want to thank here Shawn Pearce for organizing those two awesome events and Google for hosting us in theirs headquarters. Also many thanks to all great developers that I had opportunity talk and code with during User Summit and Haskaton. Hope to see you all at next Gerrit Hackatahon and User Summit.

Eclipse DemoCamp Poznań

Next on my road map was Eclipse DemoCamp in Poznan, this is almost like a tradition that I’m participating in this event, some times as a attendee, some times as speaker. This time I was presenting short introduction to Gerrit. It went well, I got some questions during presentation and afterwards. It appears that Gerrit is already used in some companies in Poznań also some persons from audience was interested in adopting it in theirs organization.

As usually, DemoCamp in Poznań was a great opportunity to meet and chat with my old Eclipse friends: Krzysztof Daniel, Jacek Laskowski, Łukasz Stachowiak, Jacek Pospychała, Natalia Klimasz and others.

Many thanks for organizers (Łukasz Stachowiak and Natalia Klimasz) for organizing yet another great DemoCamp in Poznań. See you all next time! ;D