RL027 Jorge Ferrer - Radio Liferay Episode 27

Radio Liferay

I took some time to speak to Jorge Ferrer, Liferay's VP of Engineering about all things Engineering and Development in Liferay. This time I'm not starting with butchering names, but positions. Jorge is one of the very early contributors to Liferay, started as community member and got hired, started the spanish office. After an episode "on the dark side", being the GM for Spain, he's back in engineering. We're talking about his responsibilities within the project, the company, and more.

Some keywords from the conversation:

• Changes of the collaboration structure over the year
• Liferay is hiring independent of location, building an internationally distributed team.
• Overcoming the difficulties of this distributed work
• Current team size and structure
• How to bring in code contributions as a community member
• Liferay's coding standard being mandatory to match for contributions, strict Peer Reviews
• Contribution Experience: My quick-win with a small patch that was severely rewritten during peer review (LPS-33455)
• Milestones and when to start the beta cycle for version 6.2
• The accuracy of Liferay's past release date announcements and how to improve - both on Liferay's side as well as externally: What help do we need?
• Hold your breath: I got a target release date from Jorge. Yes, there's a disclaimer, but the intent is out now :)
• The recent feature freeze
• New features in 6.2: AlloyUI 2.0 (more info on that on episode 25), Twitter Bootstrap (we'll need feedback for theme-migration, please help, adopt early and report back), New Dockbar, Controlpanel overhaul, Site Administration (no longer in controlpanel), lots of usability improvements, sharing content across sites, recycle bin
• The swiss army knife of CMS, AssetPublisher, gets a lot of new features (obsoleting some of the well hidden features that I talked about in episode 23): filtering through the search index, scripting for output.
• The big plus on the technical side: OSGI (I sense an interesting topic for an upcoming episode)
• BugSquad
• DevCon (episode with more info already scheduled)
• Jorge's architecture series of blog posts