Trying something new

[snipe]

As a way to try to promote more transparency between us (the devs) and you (the users) on what we're working on, we're experimenting with a weekly report format that will try to convey what we're working on this week, as well as some of the longer-term goals we're working on that might take a bit (or a lot) longer, but are still in active discussion and/or development on our end.

(A stretch goal here would be to hopefully reduce the amount of passive-aggressive comments on older issues that people feel aren't being worked on.)

Our weekly dev meetings will now be spent going over who will tackle what for the week based off of this list. Internally, our workflow will also change, as we vet issues that come from customers and instead of leaving them in the internal ticketing systems we use (and then having to track issues in 4 different places), will be sanitized and posted as issues on Github.

Important

The priority of an issue listed in these weekly reports is subject to change. Sometimes priorities have to shift because of a newly discovered bug, a security issue, a customer request, etc. These weekly posts are a guide, not a law.

Sometimes we have to shift priorities. This has always been true and will always be true.

Sometimes things end up being harder than they first seemed, and sometimes things not on the weekly list end up being easier than they seemed so we can easily bang those out, even though they weren't on the list.

Sometimes we have to do a bunch of boring groundwork code changes in order to move forward with the bigger feature, which can make it look like we're not moving the ball forward even though we are. (This happens a lot more than people realize.)

These reports will take a lot of time to compile, and depending on how the first few weeks go with this, we may change the timing, or the format, etc. This is very much a work in progress.

Although I'm sure we'll have some growing pains with this format, we really hope it improves communication all around.

Some Ground Rules

You may respond to these reports in the discussion area, but you cannot:

• Beg for your issue to be included because it doesn't look like we're working on enough that week, or because it "looks easy to squeeze in"
• Complain about older issues not being included
• Complain that an issue that was included in a weekly report didn't actually get done that week. We're only human and we're all doing our best, and I don't know anyone who gets every single thing they wanted to get done in a week done.

Our devs are excited about this new format, and we hope you are too. We look forward to hearing back from you about how well you think these reports are helping (or not helping.)

You can check out the first shot at this here! #17070