Guillotina and its contributors
As we have just welcomed two new Guillotina contributors, we thought it was a good opportunity to explain how the Guillotina project is organized
Guillotina is a modern, asynchronous back end designed for building high-performance, horizontally scaling JavaScript applications.
Who are the Guillotina contributors?
First, let’s introduce our new contributors: Roger Boixader and Joan Antoni. They both work at Iskra which is a well-known company in the Plone community as they have been actively using and supporting Plone for years (for decades actually!).
Roger was kind enough to answer few questions about his involvement in Guillotina:
Q: As a developer, where are you coming from and what do you do? How much Python has been in your career until now?
Roger: My name is Roger Boixader Güell, I come from Berga, Barcelona, Catalunya and I am 28 years old. I studied computer engineering in Girona, Catalunya. I had never used Python before entering Iskra and for the first year I have mainly used JavaScript. My first steps with Python were with Django and then with Guillotina.
Q: Why is using Guillotina relevant in your technical context?
Roger: Because it is the main framework that we use in Iskra on the backend side.
Q: What is the thing you like the most in Guillotina?
Roger: The simplicity to create an application, with a few lines of code of Python or with a YAML file you can start a project easily .
Q: What do you think should be improved in Guillotina?
Roger: Documentation and transactions.
Q: Have you been involved in an open source community before?
Roger: No, it's my first time.
Q: What would you expect from the Plone Community?
Roger: I think the Plone Community can help recruiting more Guillotina contributors, and the more contributors we have, the better Guillotina will get!
As we could expect, Guillotina attracts people who are not necessarily connected to the CMS world, but it is quite interesting to see Guillotina is considered as a valuable alternative to Django by young Python developers.
How is the core project managed?
The Guillotina project belongs to the Plone Foundation, just like the Plone project does, but it is obviously much younger and does not have (yet) all the Plone development and decision-making workflows.
So far, there is a periodic meeting every three weeks which allows us to discuss evolutions, important pull requests, and new use cases. Currently there are six participants in this meeting.
The repository is in the Plone Github organization.
When they join, Guillotina contributors do sign the Plone Contributor Agreement (as does any contributor to any Plone Foundation project), but they are not core contributors immediately (unlike Plone contributors). At the moment, there are three core contributors: Ramon Navarro Bosch, Nathan Van Gheem, and Jordi Massip. Their review and approval is needed to merge any pull request.
Apart from the core repository, Guillotina has a full ecosystem, managed in the Guillotinaweb GitHub organization; the most important elements are:
- guillotina_elasticsearch
- guillotina_gcloudstorage
- guillotina_ldap
- guillotina_react
- guillotina_s3storage
- guillotina_stripe
- guillotina_volto
Each of these projects has an official manager (not necessarily a Guillotina core contributor).
Sprints
We organize a sprint in southern Europe every year when there is no global pandemic! We are also often involved in Volto sprints (and these happen usually in northern Europe, but also when there is no global pandemic).
You should join!