2024-03-27 - Development Team Engagement

Jeremy Huff - Agenda is to talk about how to improve the communication between the Development Team and the TC to increase their engagement. In the future there has been attempts to increase the Dev team engagement before via the Tech Leads groups. 

Matt Weaver - [ will add from the recording ]

Olamide Kolawole - Something that's missing is the incentives - which can be defined clearly so that the Dev teams know by attending TC Meetings they will get the said incentives. Ensuring that the TC meeting consists of topics more relevant directly to the works of the Developers.

Maccabee Levine - Olamide's point is strong. Asking the Devs already joining or are willing to join about what they would like that TC needs to address from their prerspective

Olamide Kolawole - Issues like streamlining of re-building environments, having updated documentations, maintenance of vagrant boxes, etc. could be possible topic points

Marc Johnson - [ will add from the recording ]

Jeremy Huff - The topics which Olamide mentioned, it would be good if we could try to address them. There are some painful aspects of being a developer in FOLIO so it would be great if a few of those topics are pushed forward

Jenn Colt - Opening up a possibility to clear up some Wednesday slots and address a few of those topics with the Dev teams. Maybe hand over the topic selection to the Dev team.

Jeremy Huff - +1 to Jenn's Idea. Which types of mechanisms can be used to discuss about the topics.

Marc Johnson - The Tech Leads group was doing something which Jenn suggested but there was limited attendance and engagement. We can try that again or something else to achieve something similar. But coming back to Olamide's incentive suggestions, that seems like a good way to go.

Jeremy Huff - As TC we might be able to get people together to facilitate a change.

Maccabee Levine - taking one Wednesday meeting a month dedicated for the developer teams to come and discuss about topics that can be added to the queues

Marc Johnson - previous experience has proved difficult to gather participation from the dev teams in such meetings

Olamide Kolawole - Even in some dev team meetings, participation is a challenge. Like the idea about having a developer advocate involved.

Maccabee Levine - Agrees with Olamide about the benefits of having a Developer Advocate on board and involved.

Jeremy Huff - Timeline of when the Developer Advocate is getting on boarded?

Jenn Colt - The offer is being discussed and will be made soon.

Marc Johnson - What are the next steps?

Jeremy Huff - Will take the first Wednesday of every month - Dedicated topics discussion would be set aside for developer to bring topics forward. 

Matt Weaver - Timezones are going to be a challenge. Each team has members working from all around

Jenn Colt - Against setting one specific Wednesday - could be more organic - someone suggests about the vagrant box issue and the TC sets up the Wednesday meeting for discussion on the said topic.

Maccabee Levine - Not opposed to Jen's or Jeremy's idea. For timezone - PC's footsteps and schedule a different timezone meeting every now and then.

Jeremy Huff - [ will add from the recording ]

Marc Johnson - Not keen on Jeremy's idea - Gola is to try and re-enegage on the Development teams terms - but doesn't seem that way

Jeremy Huff - Open for other suggestions !

Matt Weaver - Open call for topics once a month !! Making it known that TC is looking for active participation and engagement from the Dev team.

Jeremy Huff - Like Matt's idea. Will type up an announcement present it to the TC on Monday, if quorum is reached, the announcement will be shared for Open calls of possible TC backlog topics from the Dev teams. 

Marc Johnson to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:25)
Only a few limited folks have the ability to change stuff like the vagrant boxes and the builds

The vagrant box should probably just go away entirely

There is almost no funding for changes to the builds etc

Pavlo Smahin (27. Mar 2024, 16:33)
Due to issues with the Vagrant box (such as low compatibility with Docker and high resource consumption), my team has stopped using it. We have moved to Rancher environments and Docker Compose for testing and debugging purposes.

Jenn Colt to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:29)
The most recent CC convo on funding tho

Sounded like 6 months. But yes I will admit to being less optimistic!

Marc Johnson to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:32)
That isn’t additional capacity it’s funding for the current capacity to go away

Jenn Colt to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:33)
Are there time zone issues?

Maccabee Levine (27. Mar 2024, 16:34)
TC did start a separate conversation about having occasional different-timezone meetings...

Matt Weaver to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:35)
https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/kIBP <— Here’s the link to the list of projects/teams and points of contact for them

Matt Weaver to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:39)
I like the idea of having the dev advocate involved. To me, the hardest parts are letting everyone know what’s going on (topics, schedules, etc) and actively encouraging people to attend optional meetings. Without some group with all of the dev teams (or liaisons to a group), those are especially tough. Those both take a fair amount of effort, but seem like they’d land squarely in the DA’s wheelhouse

Marc Johnson (27. Mar 2024, 16:42)
We had a dedicated slack channel for representatives from each team

It was archived due to lack of participation

Most developers should be in the #development channel

Marc Johnson to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:47)
The timed schedule we have right down is deliberately limited to fit with both US and European time zones (that’s why almost all meetings happen with a few hours window)

There is no answer to fitting Europe and the Southern hemisphere into a single meeting

Marc Johnson to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:48)
Only the US folks can reasonably meet with many of the folks in China, Australia etc

Jenn Colt to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:49)
Sorry I do think we should solicit and make the time availability known. Soliciting means we can also ask about scheduling with the initiator of the discussion

Once a month slackbot solicitation in the development channel?

Maccabee Levine to Everyone (27. Mar 2024, 16:59)
I am literally doing development for FOLIO right now as we're talking :)