Welcome to the LiteFarm team! community! This article serves as an introduction for would-be contributors and incoming staff and co-ops. We’re so excited you’ve decided to join us!
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LiteFarm is a free and open source AgTech app tailor-made to help small-scale, sustainable farmers make the right decisions about the health of their farm, their livelihood, their community, and the planet. We’re currently rolling the app out in a half dozen countries across North and South America The app is currently being used by more than 4,000 farmers in 140 countries and we have ambitious plans to reach more than 10,000 farmers in the next 3 yearsthis year. The core of our philosophy is building software farmers will actually use. This Paradigm rests on 3 core tenants:
Build functionality farmers need
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and make it accessible through a clean, accessible UI that farmers can pick up and learn (e.g. Simplicity > Robustness)
Help our farmers make a living!
Give farmers the access to expert knowledge and tools they need to run a successful farm!
These approaches serve the multiple dual purposes of incentivizing adoption of sustainable land use practices through the provision of evidence-based decision support, and significantly increasing the amount of data being collected by diversified farming operations (and thus analyzed by researchers) around the globe. It was LiteFarm is being developed with farmers at the centre of the design process and built from the ground up with accessibility and approachability utility in mind. We are proud of our Mission Statement :
To meet farmers where they are and equip them with the tools they need to make informed and responsible decisions about the health of their farm, their livelihood, their community, and the planet.
… and don’t worry, having little to no knowledge about farming is not a barrier to getting involved in the project. You can read a deep dive https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/l/cp/jzzbCrBd or read more bite-sized descriptions of /wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1241186307.
Secondarily, LiteFarm was born as a student developed project and we maintain this commitment to promoting ongoing learning. Every single “permanent” For students and contributors joining us, please know that every single member of the core team is willing and interested in helping you to become the best possible professional you can be. We want you to know this a space for learning and experimenting, where making mistakes, asking questions, and saying “I don’t know” is completely fine. As a matter of fact, the greatest “sin” is not getting the help you need. We hope you leave your term, two terms, or ten years with the project confident in:
The good work you have contributed to the LiteFarm project
Your ability to operate as a team member in a professional, high performing agile environment
Your knowledge of the PERN our tech stack
We encourage you to tackle every day as an opportunity to learn something new and stretch yourself. Once again, welcome to the LiteFarm team!
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Core development team
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This is a directory of the extended core LiteFarm development team. The list is roughly ordered from top to bottom in how likely you are to work with an individual on a regular basis. We’ve also outlined working hours, who can help with what, and the best way to get in contact with each person. Please actively reference this if you’ve got a problem and you’re not sure who to talk to.
Name | Role |
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Availability (PT) | I can help you… | Preferred Method of Communication |
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Product Manager | M - Fr: |
9AM - 5PM; 8PM - 11PM (as needed) On paternity leave portions of June - Dec 2023:  |
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Tech Lead | M - |
F: |
Technically approach tasks you are blocked or are having issues with.
Learn about any particular framework/library you hadn’t had the chance to learn.
Asking and explaining required changes on your PR when needed.
With anything that relates to the project codebase.
Slack for urgent and not urgent things (just write Kike and my name should come up).
Tagging Orangel Marquez on any question on code related issues with a particular task.
Whatsapp +592 92998855 if for some reason I’m not responding on slack.
UX Designer
M - Fr: 6AM - 2PM
Can reach me outside these hours if you send a message through Slack
with everything related to design in general and user experience and user interface design in particular
• Slack: @Sasha Avrutina
• Email: savrutina@litefarm.org
Support and Quality Assurance Engineer
Jasmin Senghera
Research + Communications Assistant
By appointment (via Slack)
Slack @ jasminsenghera
Organic Farmer subject matter expert, UX Designer, and liaison with the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia (COABC)
By appointment (via Slack)
Understand designs I build
Understand the farmer’s perspective if you’ve stumped Kevin
Slack @ Crystal
Hannah Wittman
5 AM - 2 PM |
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Design Lead | Monday - Friday 2am - 7am > 9.30am - 12.30pm (Fridays to be confirmed on a case by case) |
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Farmer Success Manager | M - F: 5:00 AM - 2 PM Graduate school calendar (days when I will be OOO):
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Manual Quality Assurance Engineer | M - F: 5 AM - 1PM |
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Fullstack Engineer II | M - F: 8AM - 4PM |
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Fullstack Engineer I + | M - F: 6 AM - 2PM |
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Fullstack Engineer I | M - F: 7:30 AM - 3:30 PM |
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Hannah Wittman | Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems | By appointment (via email) |
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Core Team
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Role
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Approximate Working Hours (PT)
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Particular skills / expertise you can share…
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Preferred Method of Communication
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Coop Fullstack Engineer
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MWF: 6AM - 2PM
TTh: 6AM - 8AM, 10AM - 4PM
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Slack: @ btai
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Kaavya Lakshmanan (Unlicensed)
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Coop Fullstack Engineer
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MTWThF: 8AM - 5PM
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Slack: @Kaavya Lakshmanan
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Coop Fullstack Engineer
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MTWThF: 8AM - 5PM
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Slack: @Yu Tian
Sprint Flow
Subject to change: /wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/59179015 
Extended Team
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Sprint Flow
Standard sprint “rituals” (AKA meetings)
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Story flow
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Tools
Here’s the list of tools you’re likely to use, including descriptions, where you can access them, and whom you should speak with to get access (if you don’t have it).
Tool | Description | To Access.. | Administrator(s) |
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Slack | Primary communication tool |
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Jira | Tool for running stories and communicating about stories. Our sprint workflow is described here: JIRA workflow | https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=1&projectKey=LF |
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Orangel
Confluence | Confluence is where we document overarching guidance documents. Guidance documents describe the “spirit” or “rules” of something within the app without getting into individual screens, endpoints, etc. |
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Github | Where our code lives |
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Orangel
Git | Distributed version control system |
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Figma | Tool for building and sharing UI | View-only access will be embedded into Jira stories |
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productboard | Roadmap |
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LucidChart | Tool for creating flows | View-only access will be embedded into Jira stories |
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Digital Ocean | Tool to host the production and integration environments | https://beta.litefarm.org https://app.litefarm.org |
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Github Actions | The CI/CD process for LiteFarm |
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LastPass | Tool for sharing credentials |
Mollie
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Zoho | LiteFarm CRM | N/A |
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Auth0
Tool for automating authentication
Kevin
Orangel
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Communications best practices
We’re a distributed team, so communications are both super-important to getting work done and maintaining a strong team culture. These are a few best practices we can recommend!
Tool | Description | Do | Don’t |
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Slack | We use Slack for 90% of our team communication. It’s nice for discussing topics or jumping on a quick call. |
If you’re not a pro today, you will be soon! |
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Jira | Jira is where we keep track of stories from sprint to sprint. Conversations specific to a particular story should take place on that story in the comments. |
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Confluence | Confluence is where we document overarching guidance documents as well as information that is helpful for anyone interested in LiteFarm. The majority of Confluence is open to the public. |
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Zoom
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Zoom | All our sprint rituals take place on Zoom so they can be easily scheduled. Kevin and |
David have a full Zoom |
account. Otherwise, |
Get comfortable with screen sharing
Slack is probably easier. | |||
Email is best for communications that will eventually exit the team, e.g. a question about payroll where we’ll need to cc an HR person. |
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Is someone out of the office, you can try WhatsApping them |
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First Week Reading List
These documents will prove useful in helping your orientate
Make sure to read the Mission Statement, Vision Statement, and especially the Paradigm to understand how we plan to put LiteFarm in the hands of 10,000 diversified farmers
David Trapp to add deep dive / day in the life to Confluence and link it here
/wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1241186307 - a few bite-sized descriptions of the diversity of current LiteFarm users
Vocabulary List - this is a VERY incomplete list of terms that are likely to crop up as you begin to explore the AgTech community. Additional lists here:
spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1703937 - please read through all of these documents so you can start understanding our users. Pay special attention to /wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/107544577 personas - these users are our primary focus for 2020./wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1703965(private) - this is an incomplete list of other digital tools in the space. Some are competitors, some are complements, but all are relevant to what we’re building.
Our roadmap (or what you’ll be building over the next few months…)
UX Guidance - Guidelines for working with the design team and Figma
Clean Code - by Uncle Bob Martin, Focus on Chapters 2, 3 and 9
Test Driven Development: By Example - the Kent Beck classic on TDD. Read the Patterns for Test-Driven Development. Hector Eryx Paredes Camacho (Unlicensed) this link is broken - do you have a link to working and free PDF?
Twelve Factor App - what LiteFarm must aspire to be
Express Web Framework tutorial along with the Tutorial: Intro to React
A sample ExpressJS reference architecture
A view to Progressive Web Apps and why this is important for farmers to work offlineAdditional reading. You do NOT need to read everything on theses lists. Please view it as added context.
Good Reads - Other reads that will orientate you to Agriculture, AgTech, Sustainability, etc.
Other things
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for developers coming up to speed…
- Take 2 - 3 hours to build the latest version of the code and explore functionality (farms, fields, crops, logs, shifts, users, etc.) in the app so you have a baseline on what it looks like now(IndividuallyCheck out Developer tips and tricks.
- Check out Introduction to the LiteFarm application.
- Following the README instructions in the code repository, set up your development environment so that you can build and run the latest code on the default branch.
- Begin working through A tour of the codebase and technical stack. Ask the #contrib or #sprint-team channel if you need some help.
- Take a look at some recent PRs to understand the review and merge process, then ask the #contrib or #sprint-team channel if you have any questions about using Git.
- Co-ops, please (individually) schedule 30-minutes with Kevin Lite Farm to create your learning plan
- (As a group) schedule 1-hour with Kike to discuss the overall architecture of the application
- (As a group) schedule 30-minutes with Kike to level-set on using Git
- .