Hi Davor,
Thanks a lot for this e-mail.
I would like to emphasize two areas where we have to improve:
1. Apache way and community. We still have to focus and being dedicated
on our communities (both user & dev). Helping, encouraging, growing our
communities is key for the project. Building bridges between communities
is also very important. We have to be more "accessible": sometime
simplifying our discussions, showing more interest and open minded in
the proposals would help as well. I think we do a good job already: we
just have to improve.
2. Execution: a successful project is a project with a regular activity
in term of releases, fixes, improvements.
Regarding the PR, I think today we have a PR opened for long. And I
think for three reasons:
- some are not ready, not good enough, no question on these ones
- some needs reviewer and speed up: we have to be careful on the open
PRs and review asap
- some are under review but we have a lot of "ping pong" and long
discussion, not always justified. I already said that on the mailing
list but, as for other Apache projects, if a PR is basically right (it
does what it should) without breaking the build, then it has to be
merged fast. If it requires additional changes (tests, polishing,
improvements, ...), then it can be addressed in new PRs.
As already mentioned in the Beam 2.3.0 thread, we have to adopt a
regular schedule for releases. It's a best effort to have a release
every 2 months, whatever the release will contain. That's essential to
maintain a good activity in the project and for the third party projects
using Beam.
Again, don't get me wrong: we already do a good job ! It's just area
where I think we have to improve.
Anyway, thanks for all the hard work we are doing all together !
Regards
JB
On 13/01/2018 05:12, Davor Bonaci wrote:
Hi everyone --
Apache Beam was established as a top-level project a year ago (on
December 21, to be exact). This first anniversary is a great opportunity
for us to look back at the past year, celebrate its successes, learn
from any mistakes we have made, and plan for the next 1+ years.
I’d like to invite everyone in the community, particularly users and
observers on this mailing list, to participate in this discussion.
Apache Beam is your project and I, for one, would much appreciate your
candid thoughts and comments. Just as some other projects do, I’d like
to make this “state of the project” discussion an annual tradition in
this community.
In terms of successes, the availability of the first stable release,
version 2.0.0, was the biggest and most important milestone last year.
Additionally, we have expanded the project’s breadth with new
components, including several new runners, SDKs, and DSLs, and
interconnected a large number of storage/messaging systems with new Beam
IOs. In terms of community growth, crossing 200 lifetime individual
contributors and achieving 76 contributors to a single release were
other highlights. We have doubled the number of committers, and invited
a handful of new PMC members. Thanks to each and every one of you for
making all of this possible in our first year.
On the other hand, in such a young project as Beam, there are naturally
many areas for improvement. This is the principal purpose of this thread
(and any of its forks). To organize the separate discussions, I’d
suggest to fork separate threads for different discussion areas:
* Culture and governance (anything related to people and their behavior)
* Community growth (what can we do to further grow a diverse and vibrant
community)
* Technical execution (anything related to releases, their frequency,
website, infrastructure)
* Feature roadmap for 2018 (what can we do to make the project more
attractive to users, Beam 3.0, etc.).
I know many passionate folks who particularly care about each of these
areas, but let me call on some folks from the community to get things
started: Ismael for culture, Gris for community, JB for technical
execution, and Ben for feature roadmap.
Perhaps we can use this thread to discuss project-wide vision. To seed
that discussion, I’d start somewhat provocatively -- we aren’t doing so
well on the diversity of users across runners, which is very important
to the realization of the project’s vision. Would you agree, and would
you be willing to make it the project’s #1 priority for the next 1-2 years?
Thanks -- and please join us in what would hopefully be a productive and
informative discussion that shapes the future of this project!
Davor
