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• The neutering of Google Code-In 2011

  23 octobre 2011, par Dark Shikari — development, GCI, google, x264

  Posting this from the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, at a session about Google Code-In !

  Google Code-In is the most innovative open-source program I’ve ever seen. It provided a way for students who had never done open source — or never even done programming — to get involved in open source work. It made it easy for people who weren’t sure of their ability, who didn’t know whether they could do open source, to get involved and realize that yes, they too could do amazing work — whether code useful to millions of people, documentation to make the code useful, translations to make it accessible, and more. Hundreds of students had a great experience, learned new things, and many stayed around in open source projects afterwards because they enjoyed it so much !

  x264 benefitted greatly from Google Code-In. Most of the high bit depth assembly code was written through GCI — literally man-weeks of work by an professional developer, done by high-schoolers who had never written assembly before ! Furthermore, we got loads of bugs fixed in ffmpeg/libav, a regression test tool, and more. And best of all, we gained a new developer : Daniel Kang, who is now a student at MIT, an x264 and libav developer, and has gotten paid work applying the skills he learned in Google Code-In !

  Some students in GCI complained about the system being “unfair”. Task difficulties were inconsistent and there were many ways to game the system to get lots of points. Some people complained about Daniel — he was completing a staggering number of tasks, so they must be too easy. Yet many of the other students considered these tasks too hard. I mean, I’m asking high school students to write hundreds of lines of complicated assembly code in one of the world’s most complicated instruction sets, and optimize it to meet extremely strict code-review standards ! Of course, there may have been valid complaints about other projects : I did hear from many students talking about gaming the system and finding the easiest, most “profitable” tasks. Though, with the payout capped at $500, the only prize for gaming the system is a high rank on the points list.

  According to people at the session, in an effort to make GCI more “fair”, Google has decided to change the system. There are two big changes they’re making.

  Firstly, Google is requiring projects to submit tasks on only two dates : the start, and the halfway point. But in Google Code-In, we certainly had no idea at the start what types of tasks would be the most popular — or new ideas that came up over time. Often students would come up with ideas for tasks, which we could then add ! A waterfall-style plan-everything-in-advance model does not work for real-world coding. The halfway point addition may solve this somewhat, but this is still going to dramatically reduce the number of ideas that can be proposed as tasks.

  Secondly, Google is requiring projects to submit at least 5 tasks of each category just to apply. Quality assurance, translation, documentation, coding, outreach, training, user interface, and research. For large projects like Gnome, this is easy : they can certainly come up with 5 for each on such a large, general project. But often for a small, focused project, some of these are completely irrelevant. This rules out a huge number of smaller projects that just don’t have relevant work in all these categories. x264 may be saved here : as we work under the Videolan umbrella, we’ll likely be able to fudge enough tasks from Videolan to cover the gaps. But for hundreds of other organizations, they are going to be out of luck. It would make more sense to require, say, 5 out of 8 of the categories, to allow some flexibility, while still encouraging interesting non-coding tasks.

  For example, what’s “user interface” for a software library with a stable API, say, a libc ? Can you make 5 tasks out of it that are actually useful ?

  If x264 applied on its own, could you come up with 5 real, meaningful tasks in each category for it ? It might be possible, but it’d require a lot of stretching.

  How many smaller or more-focused projects do you think are going to give up and not apply because of this ?

  Is GCI supposed to be something for everyone, or just or Gnome, KDE, and other megaprojects ?

• The ultimate solution to knowing how your business is performing overall

  8 janvier 2018, par InnoCraft — Community, Plugins

  Would you like to know how your business is performing overall at a glance ? Guess what, you can now do this easily with Roll-Up Reporting.

  What is Roll-Up Reporting about ?

  Roll-Up Reporting is a premium feature which you can acquire through the Piwik Marketplace. Developed by InnoCraft, the professional company behind Piwik, this plugin will :

  1. Save you heaps of time and gives you completely new insights
  2. Make this process easy as pie
  3. Reflect the structure of your business or organization

  1 – Roll-Up Reporting does the maths for you

  Yes, you read it right. Compared to having to sum reports of multiple websites manually, you can get aggregated results for your business or departments instantly with a single click directly in Piwik. Not only does this save you heaps of time compared to doing this complicated work in a spreadsheet, you also avoid human errors. With this feature, you get a clear overview over all your websites, apps, and shops performances.

  For example, if you want to know which referrers bring you the most value across all websites, then you will get the answer in a report. Same results for e-commerce reports, actions, and other metrics.

  2 – Easy as pie, no tracking code involved

  The best part of this feature is that you do not need to push data through additional tracking code. The setup is simple and made through the UI of the plugin.

  3 – Roll-Up Reporting meets even the hardest requirements

  You can also create “nested roll-ups”. This feature allows you to create a roll-up consisting of several other roll-ups. With a nested roll-up, you can create a roll-up for each department in your company (and assign all the websites of a department to that roll-up), then group several departments easily into a new roll-up simply by assigning several department roll-ups to this new roll-up.

  

  For example, a company with multiple brands can assign multiple websites to each brand, and then get aggregated results for each brand and for the business overall. As a roll-up is basically the same as a website, you can give users access to a roll-up without having to give them access to each site, and the other way around.

  How does it work ?

  As with all premium features, this plugin is straightforward to use. Once activated in your Piwik administrator panel, you will notice that when you add a website, you have the choice between two possibilities :

  

  When you select the “Roll-Up” option, a new window will appear asking you which websites and mobile apps you would like to aggregate into a roll-up :

  

  The created roll-up will then be shown just like any other website that you have in Piwik. You can create as many roll-up entities as you want.

  

  Features, such as custom alerts, segments, and e-mail reports work for a roll-up just like for any website.

  Real-Time reports

  One of the most interesting features of Roll-Up Reporting is, that you can view all the Real-Time reports, such as the “Visitors in Real-Time” widget, the “Real-Time Map”, and the “Visitor Log” across several websites making it much easier to keep an eye on your business :

  

  How to get the Roll-up reporting plugin ?

  Developed by InnoCraft, the makers of Piwik, Roll-Up Reporting is a premium feature which you can purchase on the Piwik Marketplace. You can also try it for free on the Piwik Cloud for 30 days.

  Learn more about the Roll-Up Reporting feature

• Piwik 2.10.0 – Release Candidate

  22 décembre 2014, par Piwik Core Team — Community

  We are proud to announce that the release candidate for Piwik 2.10.0 is now available !

  How do I upgrade to the release candidate ?

  You can upgrade to the release candidate in one click, by following instructions in this FAQ.

  Think you’ve found a bug ?

  Please create a bug report in our issue tracker.

  What’s new in Piwik 2.10.0 ?

  Since our last release Piwik 2.9.1 one month ago, over 100 issues have been closed. We’ve focused on fixing bugs, improving performance, and we created a new plugin that will let you better scale Piwik to very high traffic websites using Redis.

  Much improved Log Analytics

  Log Analytics is the powerful little-known feature of Piwik that lets you import dozens of different server logs into Piwik. In Piwik 2.10.0 you can now import Netscaler logs, IIS Advanced Logging Module logs, W3C extended logs and AWS CloudFront logs. Piwik will also automatically track the username as the User ID and/or the Page Generation Time when it is found in the server logs.

  Better scalability using Redis (advanced users)

  At Piwik PRO we are working on making Piwik scale when tracking millions of requests per month. In this release we have revamped the Tracking API. By using the new QueuedTracking plugin you can now queue tracking requests in a Redis database, which lets you scale the Piwik tracking service. The plugin is included as Free/libre software in the core Piwik platform. More information in the QueuedTracking user guide.

  Better performance

  A few performance challenges have been fixed in this release.

  The Visitor Log and the Live API will render much faster on very high traffic websites. Any custom date ranges that you have selected as default in your User Settings (eg. ‘Last 7 days’ or ‘Previous 30 days’) will now be pre-processed so that your analytics dashboard will always load quickly.

  For users on shared hosting, the real time widgets could be use a lot of server resource as they are refreshed every ten seconds. We’ve improved this by only requesting data when the Browser Tab containing the Real time widgets is active.

  Other changes

  We packed in many other changes in this release such as compatibility with Mysql 5.6 and Geo location support for IPv6 addresses. A community member made Piwik compatible with Internet Explorer 9 when running in compatibility mode (which is still used in several companies).

  The Tracker algorithm has been updated : when an existing visit uses a new Campaign then it will force creating a new visit (same behavior as Google Analytics).

  If you need professional support or guidance, get in touch with Piwik PRO.

  Changelog for Piwik 2.10.0 – we plan to release Piwik 2.10.0 around 2015 Jan 5th.

  Happy Analytics, and we wish you a nice holiday season !