Expanding Community Involvement & Contribution

[benjchristensen]

Earlier this year we expanded the committers of RxJava to include non-Netflix engineers. I'd like to now further explore how we can broaden community involvement and lessen dependence on me. The recent "RxJava Truck Factor" issue was a reminder of this topic and pushed several of us inside Netflix to raise the priority on tackling this.

First, a note on how great the community has been thus far! We have had great contributors, several having contributed significant time, effort and skill and without whom RxJava would not be as good as it is. Many who are not shown with "code contributions" have helped immensely in answering questions on Twitter, StackOverflow, Google Groups, blogging, speaking at meetups and conferences, or helping build reactivex.io. In short, the community around RxJava is already great.

However, I'd like to achieve a few things:

1. Make it possible for others to fulfill the "release engineer" role I'm still playing.
2. Ensure there are no irreplaceable people on the project.
3. Improve the reliability for getting code reviews and questions answered in a reasonable time frame.
4. Improve the release cadence so it is more reliable, and less dependent on me getting bursts of time.
5. Make it easier for community to get involved by pointing to where they can help in ways other than writing code.
6. Find a way to recognize people for involvement in the many important areas other than lines of code committed.

A few ideas on making these happen include:

• More engineers from Netflix with time formally allocated. I will bootstrap them and ensure they have everything needed to do releases without me.
• More comprehensive CONTRIBUTING.md (Rust has a good example: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)
• Ask community to help with StackOverflow, Google Groups, Issue/PR Triage, Twitter (and perhaps recognize people somehow who do these things?)

A key thing I want people to understand is that writing code is actually the easiest part of maintaining a project like this. The lifecycle is far harder and more time consuming. This includes:

• code reviews
• answering questions
• deciding whether a change should be made or not
• discussing design decisions and deciding which tradeoffs to make
• balancing change with stability
• writing documentation
• debugging issues
• replicating bugs with unit tests
• answering more questions
• tutorials, blogs, speaking, training, etc

All who are interested in RxJava, what ideas do you have for helping us improve and achieve the above? What else should we pursue and improve?

[benjchristensen]

Netflix Engineers involved in this discussion include: @stevegury @abersnaze @stealthcode @mattrjacobs

I am making sure they have all necessary credentials for Travis, BinTray and Maven Central so that in my absence, if there are issues with the automated pipeline, they can debug and fix. Additionally they will get the Twitter credentials so they can post to Twitter for releases and other such information.

We are working amongst ourselves to allocate time each week per engineer to help with code reviews (pull requests), Github issues, and releases.

[benjchristensen]

Various places of community engagement:

Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rxjava
Gitter: https://gitter.im/ReactiveX/RxJava
StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=rx-java
Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=rxjava
Github: https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/issues
Speakerdeck: https://speakerdeck.com/search?utf8=✓&q=rxjava

[sudaredd]

Benjchristensen, I'm not from Netflix and would like to contribute to RxJava.
Can you pls direct me how to contribute to RxJava?

Tks
Sudar

[davidmoten]

@sudaredd https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/wiki/How-to-Contribute is a start (we could probably add more info to that page)

[hamen]

I like this, guys! Kudos! RxJava is a huge effort. @benjchristensen needs all the help we can give him.
Obviously, I expect I will get a cool Netflix t-shirt as bug hunter, funny conference speaker and books author 👅

[benjchristensen]

I expect I will get a cool Netflix t-shirt as bug hunter, funny conference speaker and books author

We'll see what we can do! :-)

@sudaredd The link @davidmoten gave is the current starting point. I'm trying to mature that with this discussion and figure out how we can improve community engagement.

The best way to get started in the project is to help us answer questions at the many places above, help triage and prove bugs (and fixes), and improve documentation.

[benjchristensen]

Anyone have suggestions on how to execute on my stated goals?

[hamen]

Here are my 2 cents:

• Knowing that Netflix is offering more full-time people to the project, I think that the releasing task should be still safely handled by Netflix;
• From a coding point of view, Github should handle the contribution recognition properly: PR, comments, tech discussions will shows active users;
• From a supporting point of view, StackOverflow offers tags and top users
  http://stackoverflow.com/tags/rx-java/topusers
  Btw, congrats @davidmoten! @mrsasha we definitely need to spend more time on SO 😄
• We could use the wiki to create a collection of useful teaching contents: videos, tutorials, example, and try to involve those authors
• A bit of marketing, promoting this new project with Android Weekly, for instance, and other equivalent Java communities.

What do you think?

[artem-zinnatullin]

Anyone have suggestions on how to execute on my stated goals?

->

3. Improve the reliability for getting code reviews and questions answered in a reasonable time frame.

There are 21 open pull requests, some of them are really old, also there are 166 open issues…

And looks like that at the moment, the only active (comments, code reviews and PRs almost every day) person in the project is David Karnok @akarnokd and I guess he has other things to deal with, so it will be good to add at least one another active person to the project.

[stealthcode]

@artem-zinnatullin that is certainly a motivating factor behind adding Netflix engineers to the project and by expanding the community involvement. We want to insure that issues and pull requests are responded to in a timely manner.

[benjchristensen]

Thanks @hamen for the input.

I think that the releasing task should be still safely handled by Netflix;

Agreed.

From a coding point of view, Github should handle the contribution recognition properly: PR, comments, tech discussions will shows active users;

Agreed. Though would it be helpful to call out in a "TEAM" doc those who are actively engaged so others know who to reach out to for different aspects of the project? For example, those for documentation, build tooling, release, etc?

From a supporting point of view, StackOverflow offers tags and top users

Good point. Though not everything is on StackOverflow.

The part I'm wondering about is whether it makes sense to have individuals called out as being part of "the team". If someone is involved, but then drifts away, perhaps we have a 3 month expiry so that if we haven't seen someone for a while, we move them into "emeritus" status so we recognize their involvement from the past, but let people know they aren't actively involved.

Does something like that make sense?

[benjchristensen]

Had a working meeting at Netflix today to start transferring domain knowledge that resulted in v1.0.14 being released, without me being the one pushing the buttons.

Going forward the intent is to have the Netflix RxJava team as:

• @stevegury
• @mattrjacobs
• @stealthcode
• @abersnaze
• @benjchristensen

I am bringing them up to speed on release and communication roles, and they will start involving themselves in pull requests. Over the next week we are going to triage the backlog of open issues.

This should help address the first 4 goals:

1. Make it possible for others to fulfill the "release engineer" role I'm still playing.
2. Ensure there are no irreplaceable people on the project.
3. Improve the reliability for getting code reviews and questions answered in a reasonable time frame.
4. Improve the release cadence so it is more reliable, and less dependent on me getting bursts of
   time.

Still need to figure out the others ...