Loved every minute of this year’s week in Marseille.
The Hotel
This is a fun one, the furnishing was great! Classy. The location of New Hotel Le Quai was even better than Ibis Vieux Port because it’s located right in the middle. It doesn’t get any more central than this. The only thing is that the coffee maker was cursed in some way. 😅 There was only one morning where the thing actually worked reliably. I later googled it and it seems the chain is first and foremost interested in its interior design, which shows. But coffee needs to work for me to work.
Hackfest
But in the end it doesn’t matter because we get loaded on coffee at Biblibre’s anyway.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere was very relaxed. It was already quite warm for April, though I am of course used to the weather in Germany. Could be a misperception on my part, but I think LLMs, a.k.a. AI, really help, at least in some way. Big projects that plough through the entire codebase aren’t as scary anymore. Some missing domain knowledge doesn’t require endless googling. It’s just a prompt away to at least get the rough idea.
The Codebase
The codebase is changing at a quite fast pace. Numerous Vue modules and an entire custom frontend framework built on top that actually works. I sprinkled in some bugs that are intended to allow plugin developers to participate as well, check out Bug 42150 and the related Bug 42189.
Frontend Cleanup
There’s also a push to make the entire frontend code more modular by ending the mixture of TT and JS and instead communicate via “data bridge”, like:
...
</div>
...
<script>
const myVariable = "[% myVariable | html %]"; // For communication
</script>
<script>
const myOtherVariable = doSomething(myVariable); // Use here
</script>Or even:
...
</div>
...
<script id="some-id" type="application/json">
[% myJSONPayload | html %]
</script>
<script>
const myOtherVariable = JSON.parse(document.getElementById('some-id').textContent);
...
</script>I like it. Better code organization and we can also tidy our script tags since they won’t contain any nested TT anymore. And the scripts themselves can be cleanly moved to dedicated files. This will make rebasing and cherry picking from upstream so much easier. For more info, check out Bug 41324.
SQL Search
There’s the idea and a prototype for a SQL-based search that will allow us to deprecate Zebra. I really like the idea since it’s a simplification of the Koha stack for libraries that do not need Elasticsearch yet. Mark from HKS3 built a working demo in just a day and it could already do what it needs to. It’s based on the prior work from a plugin to normalize MARC data into structured database tables. A related goal is to rewrite the search module for this new development and migrate ES to it once it’s stable.
Beyond work
The best part of every day is of course not the code, but the people. So many great conversations to have with folks from all over the world. It was also incredibly windy that week, not that surprising for a city on the seaside, but still pretty rough if you don’t expect it!
Big shoutout to Paul and Biblibre for hosting. Thank you!
The better version of this (with pictures) can be found at domm’s site 😄