Collaborator Meeting before the NodeConfEU

[sheplu]

Following the issue opened here openjs-foundation/summit#377 and thanks to the comment by @mcollina I reopen the issue here as I cannot link it between org

There will be NodeConf EU in Ireland in November.

From experience, this is a conference that attracts a lot of people from Europe (and some from other continents) and I think this could be a good opportunity to discuss specific topics and also held another collaborator summit - even if this is an unofficial one.

Do you think this is something that could be useful to do ? And that can be organized ? Maybe one where we could try to involve more members of the community ?

@mhdawson if you want to bring this discussion during the next TSC meeting ?

[joyeecheung]

I think it would be very useful. From the early speaker announcement by NodeConf EU I can tell that quite a few TSC members and Node.js collaborators are already going to be there (myself included), so it would be a pity if we don't take advantage of the crowd and do some meetings there :)

[sheplu]

Maybe some points to add of the discussion if the TSC agree that we should try to organize something

• How many days? 1 or 2 I guess
• Before or after the NodeconfEU? Maybe we can also do two days - one before (Sunday 5th) and one after (Thursday 7th)
• Where ? It could be in Dublin like last time if this is before or in the Lyrath Estate if after?
• Regarding the topics, should we also leverage a bit more "community driven exchange" than a normal collaborator summit ?

[mhdawson]

It is possibly a bit late in the game to get things scheduled and planned. Some people may already have booked travel.

Speaking with @mcollina I don't think we can hold it at the Lyrath estate as the days etc are already planned. @mcollina I think you mentioned a potential option using workshop time? Is that still a possibilty, if so can you outline what that might look like.

[ruyadorno]

• How many days? 1 or 2 I guess

I don't think that at this point in time running a full day-or-two-long collab summit (the third one in the year!) is the best idea.

In case we really have good quorum from Collaborators at the Lyrath we should probably look into planning a couple of sessions but not much more than that. We should also be mindful about our friends organizing the collab summit in Bilbao as we don't want to steal their spotlight.

[mcollina]

I think we can at least get a 3h workshop slot, with the second on another day to be confirmed. @jasnell wdyt?

[mcollina]

We would need a volunteer to "coordinate" the slot and somebody to fill in a talk proposal (I'll send a private link)

[joyeecheung]

Some questions: Is the idea that we'll have a collaborator meetup within NodeConf EU? Do we need the content to be somewhat less assuming (i.e. for people who are not contributors)?

One idea I have: maybe we can have a recap of the strategic initiatives (or some other major block of work that are not strategic initiatives), talk about what we've been doing in these initiatives the past year, what the plans for the next year are, where we would need more hands/reviews, if there are any blockers/major challenges, brainstorm a bit about the tools/infrastructure we may have to make the work easier. Although this may mean some additional preparation work for the champions / other people who are heavily involved in the initiatives, and not everyone has the bandwidth for that. Or maybe NodeConf EU isn't the best venue to have it - I think a session like this could be very helpful, either online or offline, because usually we only have very fragmented updates in the TSC meetings and do not usually have a more high-level overview of the initiatives in any occasion, while the next-10 initiative is focused more on even higher-level stuff. But just throwing the idea out there :)

[sheplu]

I can help with that @mcollina

edit: I do think this would be a good idea @joyeecheung ! This could be a good opportunity to try to present the work done and everything you said to a broader community. We don't have to take a 3h slot for that, I guess we could split it 1h20 each ?

[mcollina]

@sheplu I've sent you the private link for sessions via slack.

[joyeecheung]

I think the length probably depends on the number initiatives we could cover there - if we have someone there in person / remote who have the time to do the preparation for a particular initiative, we could cover it in the session, otherwise we could skip that initiative. Or, those who are involved in the initiative but cannot join the session can write something up in advance so that we can at least cover it by going over what's written. If we go with this idea we'd need to coordinate within TSC a bit and see if we are onboard with this idea, how many of us are going to be there (online and offline), if the champions have the bandwith to do it, etc.

[joyeecheung]

This is the list of strategic initiatives: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/contributing/strategic-initiatives.md - also judging from the velocity of what's happening in core, maybe it's also worth covering test runner, permission model and loaders (perhaps they should've been on strategic initiatives too?)

[aduh95]

I think a brainstorming session to discuss what should a promisified child_process API look like would be really useful if we have time. It's the last outstanding items left on the Core Promise API initiative. Not much work is happening on that side for the moment, but hopefully discussing it would enable us to kick it started again.

[sheplu]

I think we could split this 3h in two times of 1h20 / 1h30 and have two different subject. I do like the idea of having one part more focussed with the community, it could be topics like

• presentation / impact of the strategic initiatives
• display some big news in core (loader, test, performance, wasi, executable ...)
• some community oriented initiatives

And on a second time have more of a technical deep dive around some core subjects

• core api

Also I don't remember perfectly the Lyrath estate, but I guess we could also have some talks with smaller groups of people near the bar or the main entrance if the rooms are open ?

[tniessen]

Is the consensus here that, if there is a collaborator meeting, it will be during the conference (6th up to and including 8th), not before or after?

[mhdawson]

Is the consensus here that, if there is a collaborator meeting, it will be during the conference (6th up to and including 8th), not before or after?

+1 to that from me.

[mcollina]

During today TSC meeting, we come to the agreement that there be will no extra days for the conference.

[joyeecheung]

Can we have a hackathon to fix the CI flakes at the workshop? We did something similar at a dinner table at one of the JSConf EU before and it was incredible fun nodejs/node#21077 and I remember there was a lunch when we took a picture giving physical thumb-ups to a fix (@Trott took the picture and posted it though I can't find which PR that was).

[mcollina]

I think this could be amazing to do throughout the full conference.

[Trott]

Can we have a hackathon to fix the CI flakes at the workshop? We did something similar at a dinner table at one of the JSConf EU before and it was incredible fun nodejs/node#21077 and I remember there was a lunch when we took a picture giving physical thumb-ups to a fix (@Trott took the picture and posted it though I can't find which PR that was).

OMG, that was an amazing time. June 2018 in Berlin. I'm sure I'll leave out some people that participated but it was definitely at least @apapirovski @joyeecheung @addaleax @targos @hashseed @ofrobots @MylesBorins and @Fishrock123. Good times. I need to find that photo....

[sheplu]

I do have a 3h slot confirmed for the NodeConfEU. (thanks to the full team 🙏 )

As this is in two months we could start thinking of how we want to use that.

I think this would be great to dedicate 1h (at least) to present and discuss strategic initiatives so discussion and collaboration.
We could maybe then use another 2 to have people & volunteers working / contributing on differents topics. Maybe we could run something along the line of "your first node.js PR"

[mcollina]

A few practical notes: this slot will likely be on the event's last day.

Do we want to try to engage more people at the conf? @RafaelGSS and the rest of the NF team have a workshop to show how to contribute to node... maybe we can link the whack-a-flaky hackathon with that?

[joyeecheung]

I don’t think 1-2h is enough to ramp up newcomers to start fixing flakes. Based on my experience of multiple code and learns, that’s only enough time for most people to set up the environment to build Node.js and run the tests successfully locally. Also if we mark certain flakes as being investigated by a new contributor it’s not certain that they would follow through and fix them when the time needed exceed how long the session lasts (my experience is that only very, very few would follow up after a session, there were several occasions where we even had to take over the code and learn PRs ourselves). But the flakes are real and need to be looked into. So I’d suggest that we do not use “your first contribution to Node.js” to fix the flakes. It would be enough however for a bunch of experienced collaborators to do something productive to the CI.

[RafaelGSS]

Sept 22nd we'll run a workshop on Node.js for Grace Hopper Day and we can use it as a metric for the hackathon. But, I suspect we would need a significant amount of time just to teach people how to build node.js (even though the building.md is well documented) and deal with OS dependencies.

But, I believe that whack-a-flaky would be better for collaborators.

[sheplu]

Following some discussion during the collaborator summit / oss summit @ bilbao, it seems there is two principales ideas

• spend this time between us to hack on some topics
• take the time to work with the community on multiples topics, maybe forming some smaller groups to discuss/present on some precise items.

Is there some other ideas or specific projects that we could be doing in a 3h timeframe ?

[joyeecheung]

Notes from the collaborator meeting https://hackmd.io/Jfav9baTRwaXL_KkF_wekw