DevX hackfest

Two weeks ago I flew to Berlin for the 2nd GNOME Developer Experience hackfest.

The event was quite productive and allowed us to move things forward in different fronts. There has been many blog posts about most of the on goings so I'll stick to what I did.

I joined the discussions about the data model APIs with Ryan and Lars and tried (and failed) to include some new widgets in Glade (GtkStack). Turns out it's not as simple as I thought and that there was already a patch in the works for this so I gave that bullet up.

Later on I sat down with Tomeu to try to revive my former attempts to revamp the API reference documentation UI a bit. He managed to produce a set of JSON files I could use to produce the UI from. My intention is to create a web frontend that works mostly client-side and is off-line friendly (pre fetching all the content) for later use. This could potentially enable a DevHelp replacement through a Web (Epiphany) App.

I have some code working using jQuery, I would like to eventually switch to AngularJS as it has built-in templating support, currently I am generating quite a bit of HTML myself and that would eventually become a maintenance/styling nightmare.