This past month was hectic, encompassing both sponsorship work and my attendance at Cloudfest. The event sparked some contribution ideas, particularly regarding how focusing together on features can enhance focus. This connects with discussions from this month’s core committer meeting about releases and canonical plugins; you can read the notes here from that.
Areas of contribution
My contribution this month was focused on a few areas:
- 6.8: Design lead for the 6.8 release.
- Backlog management.
There was a lot to do around the design lead this month including microsite, final tickets and also co-ordination. I am grateful for all the collaboration and the release squad support as always. These things get shipped when we all come together.
Backlog management started to ramp up and will more be my focus again this month, I am excited about making that my main quest for a while.
April plans
Here is a list in no particular order of what I plan to focus on this coming month:
- Extensibility: I want to focus on the editor and getting the project board there triaged, and also working on some tickets around extensibility. Extensibility is key as it’s how people can build on the editor and extend.
- Focus on ‘papercuts’ in the interface: Point releases are still going to happen. One thing I want to focus on is identifying the hitches in the experience and how we can ease. This includes the editors but also the older interface shouldn’t be forgotten.
- Backlog management: I’m focusing at least half my time on this now that 6.8 is wrapping up. For me, triage isn’t just about applying labels; it’s about closing, merging, and moving on things that can get into point releases. Backlog management also isn’t just about triage, it’s about learning what we might need to add a process or system to.
There are some other things I would like to explore if have time but these are side quests for this month:
- Document anything I learnt from being design lead that isn’t in a handbook.
- Look at if the design experiments plugin could come back again as something to use for testing.
- Any canonical plugins that need product, frontend or design. As these start to be worked on, I will begin to see who needs what and where I can be useful.
- I also think now might be the time to consider community themes a bit more, but that’s a total side quest I might go on during my own time and pick up. I still believe eventually in no-core theme, just right now having theme options are good.
Sponsors this month
I now have 3 company sponsors: BigScoots, Greyd and Kinsta. In total I now have 4 sponsors through GitHub – Aaron Jorbin, Tim Nash, Jeffrey Paul and Felipe Santos. To everyone that sponsors me and helped get me sponsorship – thank you.
Want to sponsor me? You can through GitHub or also get in touch.
There is always sponsorship of course that is volunteered and I’ll do as much as possible whilst still keeping things flowing – let’s get contributing!