Back from atoum’s day 2016

This year we got the first atoum’s day! This event is both a meeting between contributors and a meeting between users.

Unfortunately, due to some strike in France during this event, every registered people couldn’t reach us and some need to leave earlier. Hopefully, it still was a good meeting, with interesting talks. We hope, as a team, that our few users that were there enjoy the moment too.

But this event was full of surprise and quite exciting! We are really happy to speak about it, and we will probably create a new event of this kind in the future.

Team Meeting

We created this event also to speak between each contributors. This allows us to reach some points, and lay a new roadmap. We also check what we could do to improve atoum and his community. Some of the point will be detailed lower and some will be explained during the year. We would like to keep some new stuff under the hood, to allow you to discover it.

One of the point we speak about was the phptour of this year. During this event we got an area in the stand of Norsys. It helps us to talk to people, make some demo, and give our first goodies (some stickers) to you, our community. And we enjoy it ;)

Talks and User Meeting

We got four talks, instead of six due to time and strike. But it was very interesting talks and each of them was registered (badly, but we got it). You can discover it on YouTube, if you understand French (or the Google subtitles), in the dedicated playlist.

Roadmap & Next Steps

We also speak about what is missing now or what was bloated in atoum and try to create the next steps for a better tool. Regarding the code, we still need to analyse the identified pain point, before spreading them. By the way, if you want to know more about it, just join us in our chat room and ask us.

Regarding the rest, we almost put in evidence that our main weakness is the communication. So we will try to spread more words about atoum on social media but also in other place like meetup or conferences.

Some improvement that we see are sometimes just quick-win or nearly quick-win like

• blog comments that are now available, just below ;)
• A “standard edition” of atoum with some extension build-in. We will get back with it soon.

Some others are more complicated, but can also have a quick start :

• Core contributor documentation (where to find entry point, how to extend it, …)
• Extension contributor documentation (how to create it, important thing to check, …)
• How we release new version, how long we maintain it, …
• create a clearer communication related to our roadmap

Some points are more complicated but also more crucial and because we love you, here is one of these points. We know that security is important for you, we will start to use GPG key to sign our commit and make it more trustable. We already know that we need to create a build machine for our PHAR, but once it will be created, we will sign our PHAR too. This will allow you to check the validity of the new PHAR and improve your security.

And we still got some other things under the hood… Like we say at the start of this post, this event was interesting and concluding!

Conclusion

Sometimes, when you created a new project you get some secret dream about it. Sometimes, you just want to create great tools for great people. And sometimes this comes to reality. When the Frédéric Hardy create ogo, and first answer to his needs. But after a while and renaming it to atoum, a dreams come in. A dream about a meeting between contributors and users, a dream about a day with some kind of magic.

A few years later, after the leaving of Frédéric, the new team create this day, without knowing it was a dream. This is the magic of a dream.

Now we get back to testing & coding, Injecting some of this magic to what we do, Enjoy