#coderday

Houston, here we come! 

As promised, we're bringing Coder Days of Service on the road in 2015 and our first stop will be January 31, 2015 in Fort Collins, Colorado. We'll be collaborating with students from Colorado State University and other great schools across Colorado, awesome professionals from HP and local startups, and community members from groups like Girl Develop It and Code for America! Hope to see you there.

In January 2014, CodeMontage created the Coder Day of Service to answer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to serve. We wanted to show a diverse group of people can change the world in just one day, and we did. More than 200 coders joined and together we contributed over 1200 hours and amplified over 50 nonprofit technology projects.

We're thrilled to announce that this year the Coder Day of Service is hitting the road with the talented folks from Hewlett-Packard -- we'll be running events in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dallas, Texas, Houston, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We'll announce key dates and locations soon, and of course feature inspiring open source projects here on our blog as the details unfold. We hope you’ll join us!

On Saturday, January 18th, 18 awesome coders participated in the development of Quill as part of the Coder Day of Service! Contributions to Quill, as summarized by Founder Peter Gault:

Set up Quill's code to run locally on all 18 machines using vagrant.

Added a much needed feature to print the correct answer when a student gets a question wrong. Multiple teachers requested this feature, and it should greatly help students understand the material.

Built a crucial loading bar for Quill's buttons. Students sometimes hit 2-3 second lag times during peak traffic, and this causes some anxiety as they wonder whether their click was registered. With this system in place Quill's students will know that they're moving forward.

Designed a beautiful 'Support Us' page and spent time debating Quill's color palette and provided some helpful design suggestions about the color scheme.

Deconstructed and rebuilt the wireframes for Quill teacher's scorebook. The scorebook serves to tell teachers which activities their students have completed. CodeMontage coders did an excellent job simplifying the system while delivering vital information.

Began building the front end of Quill's contributors page, despite many issues getting the code installed.The goal of the contributors page is to present everyone who has contributed to Quill and to display each person's contributions.

Four coders developed a plan for using GitHub as a CMS. Under this system, all of our content is stored in a repo, and educators can submit their own lessons via pull requests. They used Parslet to convert Quill's markdown text into an API readable format. They are developing a plan for writing this information to the database. An lastly they set-up the foundation for their vagrant server. With vagrant up developers will be able to work on the Quill code without needing to install it locally.

Fixed long-standing bugs. One coder identified what was causing Quill's news carousel to print in tiny font, an issue that has been a problem for months. In addition, another coder built a custom 404 and 500 error pages, something far more welcoming than the generic heroku page. Ant they provided valuable feedback about Quill's installation process and helpfully suggested that they move from SLIM to HAML.

Edited the profile button to make it stand out in green. This will help students and teachers loop back to their profile pages after completing an assignment.

Implemented guiders.js, a library for presenting an interactive tutorial. When new teachers load the site it will be able to gently guide them through all of the functionality on the platform. This is a nice upgrade from their current video-based tutorial.

And of course, Updating Quill's documentation.

Thank you to all of the coders for making time to support open source education! Empirical is a nonprofit organization, and they are able to make an impact with students because of the support of the open source community.

You can learn more about Quill here: http://youtu.be/BA6jaeberMg

Well done! 

Keep #codingforgood,