EVE Technology Lab

As you may know, I am the developer of pykb and the http://www.decloaked.com site that runs on it. The only completely Ad-Free public killboard that I'm aware of - all funded out of pocket by me.

I'm open to mentoring other Python developers interested in contributing some new features to the system, So far I've been the only one writing code for it. This has made for a consistent system but it's also a bit of a bottleneck to growth.

The code is obtainable via mercurial: hg clone http://hg.code.sf.net/p/pykb/code pykb-code
It's split into two projects - the backend library (pykb) and a sample web site using it (web). The decloaked site runs on the code in the web project. A completely different web site is quite possible of course using pykb - feel free to borrow whatever you want from it / make your own. Beware though, all code there is GPLv3 license so all uses must remain open source.

Some features I'd like to add off the top of my head:

• User authentication using strong password encryption while minimizing the impact on varnish caching.
• Enable themeroller pre-built themes and possibly user generated ones.
• Add the ability to customize pages, including themes, and set up a monthly ISK fee based process for this.
• Write a setup script for the web site install and automate as much of it as possible.
• Write a database conversion patch from EDK MySQL to pykb MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Add a related kills / battle summary view similar to EVE-Kill's but improved in some way to set it apart.
• Write an IRC bot in Twisted to help with admin tasks for decloaked.com.
• Research ways to archive / delete old data while maintaining enough for stats and the ability to restore it on demand.
• Adding UI features to enable registering an EDK board to pull data from easily.
• Add the ability to open up a corresponding kill mail list when drilling down on a pie chart wedge in another tab.
• Look into a way to share the data with other killboards including EDK based ones and EVE-Kill if they're interested while minimizing the impact on performance; i.e. replicating the database to another server and creating an API there instead.

I generally will not allow anything that's unethical, potentially illegal or that could tarnish the reputation of the system in any way. So for example if you're an artist and would like to contribute images that's great however they must be proven to be creative commons licensed or public domain.

Like most well written Python projects the coding is pep 8 compliant so for contributions to be accepted you'll need to follow suit: Pep 8

Stop by to chat on irc.coldfront.net #pykb

If you've coded mostly with PHP or Perl it's unlikely that you'll be a good fit unfortunately as I've seen my share of Perl written in Python syntax and can't tolerate it - perhaps though you may be different and will surprise me. Being a team player and agreeing with the Zen of Python is a good sign for starters:

>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Awesome - looking forward to working with you! I'll add the items I posted above to the ticket system: tickets

Some other enhancements needed:

• Add an optional fitting wheel - look at the awful EDK code for hints but avoid copying it.
• Improve the pricing estimation script - perhaps contact the EVE-Central dev(s) for advice. It's slow and memory intensive.

If by fitting wheel all you mean is: 'stick stuff into a wheel for display'
https://github.com/fuzzysteve/Ship.js
might be of interest.