[Buildbot-devel] A few thanks are in order..

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

Over the last few weeks, we've seen a substantial uptick in activity
on Buildbot.  Many people have been behind that - filing bugs or pull
requests, or working with others in #buildbot to get their own
instance running.

I did want to call out a few who have show particular dedication to
the cause (without excluding anyone else, of course)

Mikhail Sobolev (sa2ajj) has been hacking away diligently on Buildbot
for a few months now, with a number of substantial improvements
ranging from a new plugin architecture to an overhaul of the
documentation styling (see
http://buildbot.readthedocs.org/en/latest/).  He is also maintaining
the eight branch -- in fact, a 0.8.9p1 should be coming soon!

Benoît Allard (benallard) has recently returned to Buildbot after a
bit of an absence, and is working on getting master running in
production.  Which means finding bugs.  Lots of them.  I'm sure this
is frustrating for him, but it's enormously helpful to the project --
unit tests, integration tests, compatibility tests, and even running
toy installs on my development host are all well and good, but they
can still miss a lot of problems with a rewrite of this magnitude.

Pierre Tardy (tardyp) has been working on nine almost since the
beginning, and is the primary author of the web UI.  He, too, has
driven a lot of the Python development with features needed for the
web UI.  Pierre's also helped me to find ways to minimize the number
of balls I have to juggle in some of the more complex rewrites -- for
example, he suggested the new-style/old-style distinction in build
steps, which neatly avoided the need to rewrite all of the build steps
in the codebase.

Activity is high on the project right now.  If you're a Buildbot user
and have been thinking about diving into an open source project, this
would be a great time to get started, doing just about anything --
code review (any open pull request labeled "needs more review"),
AngularJS hacking, Python hacking, bug wrangling, even marketing work
(the weekly status report is cool, but could be so much cooler!)

Dustin