The Nock Maintainathon: Success!
We're super excited to tell you about our first Nock Maintainathon. Also, this post announces our next one, as part of #OpenSourceFriday, this Friday the 18th from noon to four, where we'll focus on improving our code coverage. Keep reading for details
The First Maintainathon
Last month, Gregor and I tried a new tack to rejuvenate and improve Nock. We wrote about a one-day maintainathon for Nock, and outlined the future roadmap for the project. The idea was simple. We'd had little luck with ad-hoc maintenance, but constantly found ourselves reacting to bugs instead of working on the core parts of the code. So, we set aside time to work instead on an issue that needed to be resolved to help the entire project in the long run. We publicly announced that we were going to do it on Friday the 14th, and talked about it widely on Twitter and here. We figured we couldn't code in the same room, but we could code at the same general times.
So, what happened?
We've significantly improved our test suite. Issue #1077, which required us to remove dependencies on external sites in our test suite, had been haunting us for almost a year. It is now this close to being closed. (All that we need is to update our documentation). Dozens of issues were closed, dozens of PRs were merged, and we added a grand total of 42 commits (check out our weekly update).
We now have more active maintainers. All of this was made possible by two other people joining us: Paul Melnikow of Shields.io and Jonas Lilja. (Thank you! So much!) These two stepped up on that Friday to help us out, joining on the video calls and in some cases pair programming to sort out tough uses cases. Paul, in particular, has been exceptional, making sure that we move forward over the holidays as well. Both Paul and Jonas were already maintainers for Nock, but the maintain-athon served to bring them out of the background and to focus on how to improve.
Nock, as a whole, is moving forward. For the first time in months, it feels like the project itself has momentum, instead of just comments saying "PRs would be great!" We couldn't be happier.
Going forward, we're thinking of making the office hours-type collaboration regular. Once a month, we'll advertise a day to work on Nock. During that day, we'll turn on a Zoom channel and a Gitter for Nock, and aim to fix one non-superficial issue.
The next Maintainathon: Friday, January 18th, 12–1600.
The next day is this Friday, January 18th. Again, we'll have a staggered approach; come on in your time zone, from 12:00 noon until 4:00. We'll have zoom channel ready. You can track the Maintainathon in this issue.
Paul, Gregor, and Jonas have already gone through the codebase and added some TODOs for people to grab during the hours, and hopefully start submitting PRS. Our goal: to improve our Code Coverage, so that we can trust our tests more. The point of this is to make Nock much easier to hack on in the future; right now, it can be a bit of a mess. The more we can trust our tests, the more we can refactor, rework, and improve.
If you're new to Nock, this is a great time to get involved. Join us!
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