Justin Searls, a big name in the web dev community, has this great quote:
Software development is just putting spreadsheets on the internet.
I totally agree! My experience working at a handful of companies over the last 4 years has been that the most common asks, the most common stories, are forms and tables.
A form to create or update something. And a table to display an index of those items.
In that vein, one of the most effective, relevant, impactful skills we could have our contributors working on in order to prepare them for real world software development is precisely this: creating forms and tables.
I propose that we move in this direction, by crafting some front and backend issues to create forms and tables, for an admin interface.
We would iterate on this, and get started with:
- CRUD for users
- CRUD for code schools
This would involve three general areas of work:
- Implementation of Pundit for tiered user authorization - BE
- Forms and tables UI - FE
- Endpoints for CRUD actions - BE
IMO this would be a win/win for the OC, and for our contributors.
The OC would get a framework in place for select board members and users to be able to do CRUD actions for users, code school, etc., as well as tables with sorting and filtering for analysis.
And a huge learning opportunity for our contributors! We could repeat this concept for any db table we have. Meaning many, many opportunities for our contributors to get exposure to this work.
Another plus is that everything about this initiative is all in our control. There wouldn’t be any 3rd party dependencies or blockers. It is all standard React and Rails development. Meaning we could get it done right away, gauge and share progress, and celebrate multiple quick wins.
I think this would be great, as long as we maintain an admin interface for staff purposes (to make quick edits, such as ActiveAdmin or Forest)