2022-09-07 Meeting notes

Technical Council Sub Groups Updates

Other topics (discussion):

• Platform minimal and concentric circles of significance did come up over and over, almost an assumption we need to be heading in a "core module" direction for flower releases with room for interacting with other modules outside the core. Probably need to be involved in the technical aspects of these decisions.
• Scope, alignment, discussions among councils about authority, decisions. Good opportunity to get these things moving.
• Understanding interactions between councils and who decides what. How the PC understands their role impacts TC's. Interest in more interactions between the councils, just liaisons may not be enough.
• Allocating resources is a big question mark. Not clear how the project will deal with it yet. "Somebody" who can allocate should decide priorities, no one feels like they have that power. How to "make it so"?
• But don't necessarily have to have resources to make a decision, yes, implementation could ignore it. But worry if/when that happens, hope that it would work better than that.
• Valuable to be able to compare implementers priorities with what is being developed, so community can see what needs to be worked on. Can highlight where implementers might place resources.
• Being able to provide technical priorities to the community is important, even if it isn't followed exactly.
• PC could help provide direction for bringing good ideas into implementation. How does the good idea get to implementation, get resources, etc? Making funding opportunities easier to take advantage of when they arise. Could be productive to assume there is money and make the request, and see where it goes. TC can make direct line between goals and the funding for these technical PoCs.
• Quarterly cross council meeting could be useful
• Onboarding process on to the technical council would be beneficial. Revisiting the charter on some regular basis could also be useful. Consider re-reading so we can review charter in upcoming meeting. Want to be able to continue making decisions and not get too mired in process.

What have we been working on?

• Making a few decisions official
• Tenant and Module name restrictions
• Cross-app data sync via Kafka
• Brought back an improved RFC process
• Pilot:  Localized API (backend) Messages
• Various working groups:
• New developer onboarding and documentation
• Improved processes for tracking AWS hosting costs
• Technical goals and Objectives
• What constitutes a breaking change?
• How to handle backend translations

Goals for Next Quarter:

• Wrap up these working groups and start new ones as needed
• Start working towards alleviating technical pain points and addressing technical debt
• Continue to revisit and improve our processes so that they’re:
• More closely aligned with the other council’s processes
• Well understood and adopted across the community

• Discuss if we want to try and do this during a TC meeting or schedule a dedicated meeting.
• What's working well for us?  What needs to be clarified?  
• Scope / level of detail,
• Clarify what information belongs in which section
• Is it mandatory for accompanying materials (details designs/proposals/etc.) to be on the wiki, or can they live in google docs, etc.?
• We agreed to do this sort of exercise after each RFC, but think it's worth doing this for ADRs - maybe not after each one, but periodically.
• Retro board: https://easyretro.io/publicboard/bk8DxfBbCeZIYL1pnsBPUN2xgYb2/a07d2c6b-754b-4446-8743-7f32f2911928

Introduce the topic

• What do we want to get out of this conversation?
• Does this require a subgroup or individual to generate a proposal?

Conversation started in slack:

The Data Migration subgroup of SysOps has been struggling with how optimistic locking has interfered with batch update in Inventory. They've asked me to bring it to TC to see if there's a way to push this forward. The current open ticket is MODINVSTOR-924 Batch update with optimistic locking disabled. (This was split off from MODINVSTOR-910.)