Stockholm sprint, first draft

Signed-off-by: Maxime “pep” Buquet <pep@bouah.net>

content/posts/stockholm-sprint.md

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+---
+title: "Sprint in the cold north"
+date: 2019-10-01T20:57:38+02:00
+tags: [XMPP, Sprint]
+draft: true
+---
+
+Another episode of the XMPP sprints series happened this weekend close to
+Stockholm in the Nacka prefecture, in a house we rented. We worked together on
+improving a new groupchat bookmarks specification, file transfer
+interoperability issues, and a future landing page for new XMPP users!
+
+As usual, every developer meetup comes up with its share of bug fixes, new
+ideas, and improvements.
+
+![Stockholm scenery](../stockholm.jpg)
+
+### Groupchat Bookmarks (Bookmarks 2)
+
+Last year's summer, Dave Cridland and JC Brand submitted a new specification
+titled ["Bookmarks 2 (This time it's Serious)"][bookmarks-pep2].  This XEP
+didn't get much attention in the community until this weekend.
+
+As mentioned in a [previous article][cbg-sprint-bookmarks], there are multiple
+specifications for bookmarks in XMPP, one using the [Private XML
+storage][bookmarks-private], and another one using [PEP as
+storage][bookmarks-pep1]. Not so long after the Cambridge sprint last year,
+Daniel submitted a [conversion XEP][bookmarks-conversion] to facilitate client
+behaviour and thus user experience.
+
+This new specification also uses PEP as storage, but it brings a few
+improvement to the table, specifically because it splits updates to the
+bookmark storage into per entry operations instead of updating the whole
+storage at once. This allows for finer grained handling in clients, and
+prevents some race conditions.
+
+The XEP came up with its share of challenges that some of us attempted to fix
+in a [pull request][bookmarks-PR-835] that has been submitted and is now
+awaiting feedback from the authors.
+
+[Bookmarks 2][bookmarks-pep2] is now implemented in at least 4 clients,
+(Gajim, Conversations, Dino, Renga, some initial work in Movim and poezio),
+but will not be used as long as the feature is not advertized by the server. A
+new [prosody module][bookmarks-prosody] is also available for adventurous
+services operators.
+
+[cbg-sprint-bookmarks]: https://bouah.net/2018/08/cambridge-xmpp-sprint/
+[bookmarks-private]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0049.html
+[bookmarks-pep1]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0048.html
+[bookmarks-pep2]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0402.html
+[bookmarks-conversion]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0411.html
+[bookmarks-PR-835]: https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/835
+[bookmarks-prosody]: https://modules.prosody.im/mod_bookmarks2.html
+
+### New landing page
+
+Roal and I worked on an idea that came up at the UX sprint in Brussels in
+January, to have a landing page for new users that would recommend a specific
+server depending on different factors that would be gathered automatically for
+the most part (if not all). This is more or less similar to other portals like
+[joinmastodon][joinmastodon], or [nextcloud sign-up process][nextcloud-signup].
+
+While I am no designer at all, building up a website isn't the hardest part,
+what is hard is finding a way to convey to the user what "federation" or
+"public network" mean. Roel teaches in Interaction Design, and so he was a
+great help over the weekend. We came up with a narrative for the project, and
+a sketch for a sign-in flow.
+
+The project is far from being over, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Lots
+of work needs to be done with the "stakeholders", that is mainly users and
+server operators.
+
+To know what server to recommend to users, we need to first get a list a
+servers we are confident about and are willing to recommend. This would
+certainly mandate discussing with server operators to get feedback. And this
+would then be fed into usability testing sessions for user to validate all of
+it. After that, we would need lots of promotion around it, and that's also
+going to take a significant amount of effort.
+
+While I am excited about all this, I don't think diving in head first is a
+good strategy and I would rather take it slow.
+
+[joinmastodon]: https://joinmastodon.org
+[nextcloud-signup]: https://nextcloud.com/signup
+
+### And more
+
+Pulkomando has been working on implementing IBR support in [Renga][Renga], and
+reported with Link Mauve issues to server implementations that weren't
+respecting the specification. The issue in prosody has been fixed, and one has
+been opened [for ejabberd][IBR_ejabberd].
+
+Larma tackled issues with bot bridging, where for example with
+[matterbridge][matterbridge], users of the bridged network are displayed as
+talking through the bot. This could be improved UI-wise, but requires some
+groundwork and spawned [discussions][MUC_thread] about the groupchat protocol
+in some specific cases.
+
+Fiaxh spent some time improving the empty placeholder for no opened
+conversations in Dino. Here is a preview:
+
+![Dino no-conversations placeholder screen](../dino-no-conversations-placeholder.png)
+
+Other people worked on Jingle File Transfer interoperability and narrowed down
+the cause of a somewhat old issue [in gajim][FT_gajim], and also discovered
+an issue with the epoll backend [in prosody][FT_prosody], and another [in
+dino][FT_dino].
+
+[IBR_ejabberd]: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/issues/3045
+[matterbridge]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
+[MUC_thread]: https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2019-September/036495.html
+[FT_gajim]: https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/issues/9692
+[FT_prosody]: https://issues.prosody.im/1438
+[FT_dino]: https://github.com/dino/dino/commit/5d65f047d0fd1a1ed4a3bbe076d5cb4df76e7d5f
+
+### You can contribute too!
+
+I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that you can also
+[contribute][sprint-guidelines] to sprints! If you are a developer, a
+translator, working on documentation, or in any other way contributing to an
+XMPP implementation, we encourage you to find 2-3 other people close to you
+and organize a sprint!
+
+The [XMPP Standards Foundation][XSF] (specifically the [SCAM][SCAM] team) will
+be happy to help you get it all sorted, and also provide some budget for your
+event if necessary. Please do [contact us][sprint-room]!
+
+[sprint-guidelines]: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Sprints#Organizing_an_event
+[XSF]: https://xmpp.org
+[SCAM]: https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/scam-team
+[sprint-room]: xmpp:xmpp-sprint@chat.cluxia.eu?join