2018-03-29 Engineering Meeting

Date/Time: 2018-03-29 @ 13:00 UTC / 09:00 EDT / 21:00 HKT
Length: 45 minutes
Meeting link: https://zoom.us/j/416493133

Attendees

  • Larry
  • Chase
  • Thomas
  • Aaron
  • Jack
  • Ken
  • Jeff
  • Jude
  • Muneeb
  • Shankar

Browser changes

Raised by Chase
We should address technical debt in the current repo and not do a rewrite

Community Task Board

Raised by Shankar
“Good to have: It will be good if there is a “Engineering task board for Community” where passionate people can pick up some of the engineering tasks like Development, QA & bug fixes (kinda Github one). Plus some of the other activity (design, review portal, giving live technical sessions) in separate task board and it can be tracked by others in community.”

Muneeb: we’d like to use Trello for a general roadmap - communication
Larry: we should clearly document and present areas of the product that are clearly extensible

Next steps:

  • assign time/process to mark issues as help-wanted or good first issue

Deprecate the CLI

Raised by Jude
Background With the browser no longer dependent on Core, and Blockstack.js subsuming most of it’s functionality, the Python CLI is now redundant. I have a Blockstack.js-based CLI I’ve been writing to serve as a test harness for Blockstack.js in the integration test framework, but it could also be offered to advanced users who still need a CLI for managing names and profiles.
Desired outcome Decide whether or not to deprecate the Python CLI in this next Core release, and decide where the new CLI should live. Also, decide which CLI features should be preserved (maybe open this to the community)

  • 28,000 lines of code that can be removed

Conclusions:

  • Don’t productize this CLI tool
  • Deprecate the python CLI

Figure out maintainers.

Background:
The Blockstack core team is trying to organize in smaller teams and then get more engineers on various teams. We’ve seen feedback from the open-source community that it’s not clear who maintains what repo/library and should be the point person. Trying to figure this out can help with the organization into smaller teams as well (for the core team).
Desired outcome:

  1. Figure out maintainers for repositories/libraries for the next cycle.
  2. Figure out what repos we’re actively maintaining and which one’s we’re not.

A cycle could be 6-months for example.

Action Item: Create paper document with list of repos and products and potential maintainers.

1 Like

Good to have: It will be good if there is a “Engineering task board for Community” where passionate people can pick up some of the engineering tasks like Development, QA & bug fixes (kinda Github one). Plus some of the other activity (design, review portal, giving live technical sessions) in separate task board and it can be tracked by others in community.

2 Likes

Deprecate the CLI

Background With the browser no longer dependent on Core, and Blockstack.js subsuming most of it’s functionality, the Python CLI is now redundant. I have a Blockstack.js-based CLI I’ve been writing to serve as a test harness for Blockstack.js in the integration test framework, but it could also be offered to advanced users who still need a CLI for managing names and profiles.

Desired outcome Decide whether or not to deprecate the Python CLI in this next Core release, and decide where the new CLI should live. Also, decide which CLI features should be preserved (maybe open this to the community)

Figure out maintainers.

Background:

The Blockstack core team is trying to organize in smaller teams and then get more engineers on various teams. We’ve seen feedback from the open-source community that it’s not clear who maintains what repo/library and should be the point person. Trying to figure this out can help with the organization into smaller teams as well (for the core team).

Desired outcome:

  1. Figure out maintainers for repositories/libraries for the next cycle.
  2. Figure out what repos we’re actively maintaining and which one’s we’re not.

A cycle could be 6-months for example.