RFC: Host one Codebase Refinement per quarter in 2022 about readme HOT 11 CLOSED

There are not enough ❤️ emojis that I can give to this RFC. I am so into this!!!!

from readme.

Love this idea, thanks for raising it. I will try to add some tech debts to the notion board.

from readme.

In the absence of a FE platform and Internal Tools team while simultaneously staring down an increasing pile of tech debt in a few different areas, this may be the missing piece we've been looking for 👍 I also suspect people very much like working on this kind of thing (regardless of skill level) so also agree that it'd be great for morale.

from readme.

This sounds exciting/intriguing! When we were discussing the quarterly hackathon idea, someone raised that we could use the time for other things besides hackathon. So if it achieves similar goals and we're excited about this, perhaps we could use the next hackathon slot to try it out?? (cc @mdole as the DRI 😄)

from readme.

@mdole I love the name of "Refine-a-thon", thanks! 😄

And I 100% agree that some preliminary work is necessary.

This is why I added a planning session, but something before that would also be nice to have.

We could have a couple of things:

A notion page for each repo where people add things. example
We could also send out an email once per month with a google form questionaire where ask people
which repo or repos they work on and to provide feedback, what they liked, what could be better, things they'd like to add etc, which we could later use to further populate our repo-notion pages.

After having collected ideas from people we could use the planning session to upvote things we'd like to tackle and have volunteers to address them, same way as we do in a hackathon.

from readme.

My one question is: What about Future Friday? Since that occupies a lot of this sort of space. However, I don't think FF is good at generating momentum in the same way that an organized event is, and in general only a few people publicly participate.

from readme.

My one question is: What about Future Friday? Since that occupies a lot of this sort of space. However, I don't think FF is good at generating momentum in the same way that an organized event is, and in general only a few people publicly participate.

Future Friday is great for addressing smaller issues that can be decided by upvoting in some of the dev channels. But with one day every 2 weeks it's not really possible to address what this RFC suggests.

from readme.

After the positive feedback we've started collecting some of the ideas here. Feel free to contribute! :)

from readme.

I support this idea and I like the idea of trying a refine-a-thon! One thing that might help make it successful is some preliminary work to define and focus the time.

For example, if we just say "we're going to spend 3 days on refinements!", that could mean many different things to different people. One person might spend it on internationalization, another on Force routing, and a third on cleaning up Cohesion helpers.

Those are all valid uses of our time, and our codebases would be better for them, but it sounds like the goal as stated in this RFC is more about consistency and standardizing conventions.

With that in mind, we could devote some time (perhaps at various practice meetings?) to getting more specific before we begin. Instead of "refinements", it could be "Gravity: Migrate the Artwork model to Postgres (😅)" and "Volt: Make the Shows route React" etc. etc.

Basically, I think it would be great to pick out some of our highest-priority/biggest-scope tech debt and attempt to tackle that. Defining what exactly that means will take some time and leadership!

from readme.

it could be "Gravity: Migrate the Artwork model to Postgres (😅)"

Only this ☝️ would already be enough reason for why we need the refine-a-thon and I think almost everyone in engineering thinks that this is urgent and needs to be addressed.
Thanks @mdole for making the RFC more haptic by giving such a great example for what we could do.

I think similar to the hackathon, we should collect ideas beforehand for the refine-a-thon and then form little temporary teams for the projects. We could also create a manifest of code-values before in order to align the goals/outcome of each refine-a-thon... The manifest would define what things like consistency, security, accessibility, good design, expandability etc. mean to us with examples in where it is done well vs. where it still needs to improve.

from readme.

Resolution

After the positive feedback we decided to do this.

We have started collecting some the ideas here, feel free to contribute!

While this RFC proposes one refinement per quarter we haven't finalized the cadence of it.

Level of Support

1. Overwhelming positive feedback.

Next Steps

We will use the next Hackathon slot (end of June) as a first iteration and by the end of the first refinathon we will discuss outcomes, and decide on the cadence. @patrinoua will be the DRI for these discussions.

from readme.