Here are final details for our Developer Day this Saturday. We’ve had to amend the location as there are more people than we expected – which is great news!
If you plan to come, please let us know if you’ve not already been in touch.
Time and place
Date: Saturday 6th March 2010
Time: 10.30am for 11am start, till about 6pm.
Venue: BeginSpace (see picture)
Address: Burleigh Street, Cambridge
Here’s a journey plan from the Railway Station to BeginSpace.
BeginSpace is just outside the entrance to the Grafton Centre, one of the two main shopping centres in Cambridge. If you get lost, ask someone for directions to the Grafton Centre, as it’s quite well-known.
Plentiful and secure cycle parking is available just outside the entrance.
We’d like to thank our friends at BeginSpace, who have provided use of their incubator space for the day. Wi-fi access will be available, so please bring your laptop if you have one. We’ll be in the main upstairs room, but there sofas in the breakout area downstairs.
What we’ll cover
Things that are likely to be included, subject to time, are:
- Overview of the CycleStreets architecture – explaining the way the system works, and what its limitations and strengths are, as well as how the code is structured. (We’ll expand heavily on the stuff that’s in this introductory FAQ.)
- Improving the translation from OSM data to CycleStreets (and how it works).
- The feedback system and its feeding-through to OpenStreetMap data, and people’s ideas for a better backend for this.
- How other webapps can be built around CycleStreets (or integrated as layers and new sections in some way)
- Plans for open-sourcing.
- How to get other people helping with coding of the most complex part of the system: the routing engine
- Longer-term direction of CycleStreets.
- Mobile phone interfaces.
- Funding!
- Installing the code (see below) – and getting people going on a few little improvements!
- But mostly … Whatever people want to talk about.
Getting stuck into the code: mini-projects
Depending on what people want to do, we hope towards the end of the day to get people going on some small, mini improvements to CycleStreets by way of introductory projects.
We’re working as fast as possible this week to get a small download (probably 200MB or so) available to enable a CycleStreets installation to be reproduced, which we’ll be making available and will go through on the day. (We will require people to sign a simple contributor agreement if so, as we’re not Open Source yet, but we think people will find it reasonable; we’ll try to get that online in advance.) The installation will thankfully cover only a relatively small area or two – the full dataset is huge!
We’ll get onto hacking the code later in the afternoon, so people who don’t want to do any actual coding need not worry or feel obligated to take part.
In terms of software required:
Software to set up on your laptop
Software required (please set up in advance if possible) is as follows.
The code is written in object-orientated PHP, but we hope that people familiar with other languages shouldn’t find it too difficult to understand what’s there.
- Any OS (Windows/Mac/Linux are all known to work fine – we like to code cross-platform!)
- Apache webserver (we use Apache 2.2.x; older should probably work)
- PHP 5.3.x as mod_php in Apache (i.e. not a CGI installation). 5.1 and above should work, except for the journey planner engine itself, which requires 5.3-specific features.
- PDO-MySQL (part of PHP5.3, but sometimes bundled as a separate package)
- MySQL 5.x (older almost certainly will not work)
- Ideally an SVN client, but we should have a zip file snapshot available too
Sustinence
We’ll pay for lunch (still to be sorted out), and we hope to offer home-cooked pizza afterwards back at Simon’s house.
We will hopefully then go to a pub if people are around for the early evening!
