“Breakin’ da law!” by Gardner

Prelude
Ok so technically I am not allowed to talk about anything that I do for CouchSurfing International ever. For the rest of time. By signing the NDA I entered a legal contract. If I break that contract I could be held financially liable for any damages caused. A good resource to find out more is the wikipedia article which covers breach of contract

This situation could be avoided if our source code was released under an open license and we didn’t have any secrets. An open license will also attract more developers to the project which may be unable to sign the NDA due to other contractual obligations or perhaps some zealous sense of righteousness.

I think that even the NDA may fall under trade secrets since there is no link to it on the site which would be that just by making this post I have already broken the law. So just by telling you that I signed a contract which stated:

“Gardner Bickford agrees not to disclose to any Prohibited Persons any Trade Secrets and Confidential Information, directly or indirectly, and whether for compensation or no compensation, without the express written consent of Company. Any such written consent shall be strictly construed in its scope and interpretation against disclosure of Trade Secrets and Confidential Information, shall be strictly construed in its scope to maximize the definition of Prohibited Persons, and shall be strictly construed in its scope to limit the amount of information which constitutes Trade Secrets and Confidential Information.” which is available at
http://couchsurfing.com/nda.html could be a breach of contract.

So I am now an outlaw. I will continue to break the law by letting you folks know what I have worked on while staying here at the NZ collective:

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Saturday was St. Patty’s day. Sunday was relatively painful and I don’t believe that my brain was functioning at full capacity. This would explain why I created the goal for myself to close all of the bugs assigned to me this week. Yesterday I closed one from January and another that I submitted myself. Today I am wondering if I should prioritize my action item list and fix the glaring issue of password security on CS. There’s currently no requirements for new user accounts being created which means that users can use weak passwords. What’s worse even still is that passwords are sent over the network in clear text which means that on a wireless network at a cafe or even here at the collective someone could snatch the passwords right out of the air.

Now that I think about it I think I’ll fix that today.

Gardner

CouchSurfing in Syria!

Right now I’m in LA, it’s 1:25 AM, and I decided to stay up later. My flight is only leaving at 6:20 PM tomorrow. 18 hours later I will be arriving in Auckland. I’m not too eager to leave the US. I had a great time here. My life has changed. Again. CouchSurfing is so much cooler than I had thought, and now I’m totally addicted to making it better.

When I went to the Collective in Montreal I didn’t really know what to expect. I just wanted to set up a CouchSurfing Wiki. Which I did! Do-ocracy is the rule. The Wiki is turning out to be a big success, with over 100 registered users and more edits than I can read. I didn’t have any clear goals. I just wanted a platform where people can cooperatively work on documents related to CS, and somehow related, a Guide for CS all over the world. No Tourist Guide, a CouchSurfing Guide. Where people who want more guests, but live outside the city, advertise themselves. Where you can write about good places to hold CS meetings. Where you can explain people coming to your country how to be a good guest. Today I was reading the article about Syria and it made me happy!

I only spent two weeks in Montreal, the final weeks of the Montreal Collective. But I met many amazing people, whom I will meet again and again for the rest of my life. And I started programming on the CS code, just a little bit. With amylin I hitchhiked down to NYC, drove to San Francisco with a CouchSurfer I met in Lima, hitchhiked to Quincy, and did some more programming. And more hitchhiking to Portland OR, more programming, more hitchhiking!

Last week http://bugs.couchsurfing.com was set up. More than 70 bugs have been reported. Which is great! The more bugs reported, the healthier the project! It makes it easy for developers to go and fix them.

There are so many people who want to help out with technical issues, programming, security, design. It’s just hard to get them started. There are still only 3 people who regularly submit patches (incremental improvements to the code), Casey, Anu and me. That needs to be improved. But, the current code base is not the most readable ever. So things need to be redesigned.

One good way to get new programmers started is putting out small (harmless) parts of the code out there, and ask for improvement. People who send in useful patches can be given access to the entire code.

Check the NZC Technical Goals on the Wiki for more information. And feel free to edit or to leave comments on the discussion page.

peace,

Kasper