Async Reflection: Improving how we work

[eingenito]

Async Reflection

Use this issue to enumerate our challenges and suggest (and agree to try out) solutions.

• For a one week let's reflect on how we can improve the go-ipfs project. It can be challenges with or without proposed solutions, or things we currently do and want to do even more of. Consider starting comments with "I wish..." or "I like...."
• Then we'll vote for the challenges we think are most important to address first - maybe because they're the most acute, or maybe because they're the ones that don't seem intractable. Up to the voter. We may group similar ideas to avoid vote splitting. You get three votes.
• Then I'll create new issue/PR summarizing the most popular challenges and solutions. The team will have an opportunity to refine the solution part, I'll restate the solution and after a final call for dissenters we'll agree to try our solution out. Keep in mind these might be as un-momentous as say 'Make a PR template for go-ipfs with these fields ...'. We don't have to solve everything at once.

Guidelines

• We don't have to be super ambitious. This project isn't going away, so we can feel free to defer tough questions if we don't have good answers.
• This is a public forum, and people with zero context can read this issue, so just frame things constructively. We don't want to scare away passers by.
• One 'I wish/like' per comment so we can easily vote on them afterwards.

Notes

Our previous async reflection was #5781

[eingenito]

We had an extended weekly meeting where some current project issues came up, and some proposed solutions - I'm going to capture them in comments here just so we keep track of them.

[eingenito]

Too many Github issues

Making the them less useful to us as a team. Many are just really old, some are no longer valid, some have been abandoned.

@Kubuxu proposed coming up with a document for how to treat various cases (old, cross-impl, etc) as a first step. Very hard to argue with that idea.
@michaelavila proposed declaring bankruptcy and starting from scratch. This will create a ton of notifications for some people, but probably not that hard to bulk dismiss
@Stebalien proposed a Triage Tuesdays for a slightly different purpose, but then it was also seen as a potential way to work through the backlog.

[eingenito]

Triage Tuesdays

@Stebalien proposed a Triage Tuesdays to look at new issues in Github and decide what to do about them, particularly which ones were important enough to take action on, immediate, near term, or other.

@eingenito related this back to the currently not super useful project board (although thanks @magik6k and @Stebalien for sticking with it). I thought it might be a good place to indicate and prioritize issues that need immediate attention.

[eingenito]

High Priority Issue Tracking

I wish there was a place where we could see the limited subset of issues that really need immediate action. These are often bugs and things that are holding up a release.

I mentioned using the project board for this. Other people mentioned the milestone feature in Github and the fact that we could create milestones and then tag issues with milestones to indicate which ones were important to complete.

[hannahhoward]

I like our dailies. I always learn so much about what other folks are working on and it makes me feel like I know way more about the project.

[hannahhoward]

I wish we had more folks with a wide and deep knowledge of the whole project like @Stebalien. It makes me anxious that while lots of people know lots of things, only Steven seems to have the 40,000ft view from a technical standpoint, and that makes me anxious he will never get to go do other things.