With Pidgin 3's development cycle taking so long, I started doing a quarterly presentation that I call the State of the Bird quite awhile ago. This is obviously a spin on "State of the Union", "State of the State", and so on.
These presentations are meant to help people understand what's going on in the project as it's really hard as an outsider to know what exactly is happening even at a high level. These blog post do help convey some of the bigger ideas, but not quite the day to day or even week to week happenings of the project.
But the State of the Bird also gives us, the development team a moment to take a step back and look at what we've done over the past quarter. Again, with development taking so long it's really easy to lose motivation and I for one feel that actually looking at what's been accomplished helps keep that motivation alive and well.
This is done at a high level by looking at metrics of contributions, review requests, opened and closed issues, and how many commits where made. But we also specifically highlight more major milestones like the release of a library, a new API, decisions to deprecate and remove things, or even new features.
I feel that doing so helps people from getting lost in the shear amount of remaining work for us to even get to an alpha release.
We may even do a demo, that of course usually ends up being dangerous, so people can see how the program is progressing.
We also set aside time during the State of the Bird to answer questions from the community. Unfortunately there haven't been many during the last few presentations but I'm hopeful that will change in the future.
If you are unable to attend and would like to ask a question, feel free to leave it in a comment below and I will answer it during the presentation which will be available on YouTube afterwards.
Our next State of the Bird will be Friday July 28th at 1:00 AM UTC. You can get that converted to your time zone here.
I hope you're enjoying these posts! Remember they go live for patrons at 9AM CST on Mondays and go public at 12AM CST on Thursdays! If there's something specific you'd like to see me cover here, please comment below!
Top comments (0)