It’s been a little over four months since I joined the Nerds team at INN as their second software apprentice. With just about four months to go, now is a good opportunity to reflect and set goals before the end catches up.

News Quiz/Interactables. For one of my first projects, I wrote a WordPress plugin wrapper around Mother Jones’ news quiz library. During the process we talked about what a framework for registering and maintaining more interactive features in the future would look like. This Winter I hope to build out those ideas.

Unit Tests. Early on, I researched options for building unit testing into our theme development process and wrote about it here. Since then Ryan Nagle has built this into our deploy tools and written up some testing examples. Much of Largo still needs tests written, which I want to make a point to help with.

Analytic Bridge. Born out of a weekend project, I wrote a WordPress plugin that pulls and relates metrics from Google Analytic to post objects in the WordPress database. As a proof of concept, I adapted this into a Popular Post widget (a highly demanded feature by members), but the functionality could be used in a variety of applications.

I expect to work out the bugs and extend the features of this plugin in the next couple of weeks, as well as tweak the algorithm to make the popular posts widget ready for prime time.

Fixes/enhancements to Largo. Recently I’ve been picking up some tickets related to getting our Largo Project ready for version 0.4. Learning a lot about the codebase in the process, this Spring I’ll no doubt have the opportunity to contribute more.

Documentation. Documentation for Largo currently exists in three or four different places. Since the addition of our Support Specialist Meredith Melragon to the team we’ve doubled down on our efforts to keep and update complete documentation for both administrators and users.

Recently I’ve been working with Meredith to add python driven sphinx to our deploy tools. The benefits of documentation being versioned along with our code, yet accessible as compiled html means all our contributors have access to writing docs and end users have a single web source to find help. One of the biggest unresolved issues is how to incorporate our existing php block comments into these docs, a problem I hope to research and solve.

This kind of stuff sound like fun? Looking for something to do this summer? Find out how you could be INN's next software apprentice here.