So yeah this has been on my mind for a very long time, and on a very long train ride I finally had time to write down some of these ideas.
- Documentation We have some scattered documentation. A lot of stuff is outdated (eg. mentions TraceMonkey). We should try to update some of it and move them MDN. - Meetings We should have Bi-weekly public (vidyo or Google+ hangout kind of thing) meetings. For outside people it's very hard to follow what goes on in the "JS pit". And even after nearly two years, I have no idea how some of the people, I chat with nearly every day, sound like. :( - outsider work weeks? - Monday meeting notes We should strive to have complete meetings notes on every monday. I think we should create a weekly eatherpad or wiki-page, where everybody writes down important changes he/somebody did, on the next monday we than copy it onto the weekly notes. (Or as a blog post, you get the idea) - Contributor Engagement We should do a better job at rewarding new and successful contributor. For example add them to the Friends of the Tree or just send them a T-Shirt, card, whatever. Or eg. people who do projects for a class might like some statement how much impact their work had. But most importantly: We lose the, arguably few, very promising new people in the dust all the time :( (I realize a lot of them just did that as a class project, need more time for work/study etc.) - Blog posts I think we do a pretty good job communicating via our blogs. (I personally know how much time you spent writing them, and some of us aren't even native speakers) But I do fell we lacks some updates regarding the IonMonkey development and some neat details about the GC work. On the other hand ES features and Debugger work etc. are _very_ fine (Eg. Jason, Jeff etc. thank you). Dave and me do/did weekly/monthly sometimes, they take a lot of time to prepare, this should get easier with the idea in "Monday meeting notes". - Community engagement Arguably the "least" important factor here. Just a shootout to Jan who occasionally answers question here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1948595. And to other people who respond on threads at HN, reddit & co. Also twitter. (I noticed people get very excited when you spill details why something is really slow on HN or stackoverflow). - Reviews Please _no_ "LGTM" reviews. Something more personal, that encourages future involvement and may even point out some other bug that should be fixed after that bug. Two to three words more per review shouldn't hurt. Some additional applause on IRC doesn't hurt either. I noticed that recently we had a lot of comments on coding style, this leads me to believe that we need some very short wiki-page about some common coding style (I think we have that somewhere?). I would just like to mention that we are doing a good job at documenting thoughts/processes on Bugzilla. We can't simplify that, diving in just takes time. - Mozillians.org If you haven't yet please create a profile on there, add yourself to the "SpiderMonkey" group. This is kinda the new age JavaScript:Hackers (Also this is still useful to get a fast overview). - Events/Conferecens Not sure yet. This are a lot of points and I hope you all appreciate it and get some ideas. Of course this won't help immediately ... I hope you recognize this as useful. (I considered making this a private email). Cheers, Tom _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-internals mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-internals
