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General Discussion / Idea: 100% delegate to fund small tasks done by community members
« on: January 28, 2015, 06:23:02 am »
We should have a delegate whose job it is to identify tasks suitable for community contributors. For example, quickly off the top of my head and going through the issue tracker, the following aren't considered critical enough to spend much core developer time on right now, don't require a thorough understanding of the code, and would be a great place for a new-ish contributor to get their feet wet:
- Write help documents, blog posts, tutorials, etc. explaining a particular screen or click flow
- Implement robohash server natively in the wallet
- Alternate image sets for robohashes
- Testing, testing, testing! Explain our test frameworks, write better ones, write tests that expose new bugs or reproduce old ones!
- Find a place where double is used in the code, rip it out and use an exact data type instead
- Test various workflows, such as cold storage
- Find and fix the functions that use too much stack space
- Let collateral vote
- IPv6
- Serialization code generation for multiple languages (perhaps by translating FC serialization to protocol buffers or the like)
- Begin to document our almost entirely undocumented homegrown do-everything library, FC
- Allow UNIX sockets to be used, including passwordless authentication based on user ID like Postgresql
Before I became a core developer, I was a community member. Some of these were fixes I was considering working on. I didn't want to put forth substantial engineering effort to write a patch without some reasonable expectation of payment, and bytemaster was leery of promising payment for a product that hadn't been created (and I'm sure I3 budget woes due to AGS funds hurting from BTC price decline didn't help the situation). Now that I'm a core developer, we've solved the impasse, but most of my time is taken up with pressing issues and new feature development / testing. I haven't even really had time to set up price feeds or a daily pay withdrawal script for my own delegate!
In early days, there were bounties for many tasks, but I believe this was discontinued when it was discovered that managing the bounties was taking too much time away from development.
So I'd like to see a 100% delegate slot used to fund small, self-contained projects like those I listed here. The delegate maintainer would be responsible for putting together a list of tasks and awarding payment, community members could bid on tasks, and the core team would have the final say on merging pull requests into official releases.
- Write help documents, blog posts, tutorials, etc. explaining a particular screen or click flow
- Implement robohash server natively in the wallet
- Alternate image sets for robohashes
- Testing, testing, testing! Explain our test frameworks, write better ones, write tests that expose new bugs or reproduce old ones!
- Find a place where double is used in the code, rip it out and use an exact data type instead
- Test various workflows, such as cold storage
- Find and fix the functions that use too much stack space
- Let collateral vote
- IPv6
- Serialization code generation for multiple languages (perhaps by translating FC serialization to protocol buffers or the like)
- Begin to document our almost entirely undocumented homegrown do-everything library, FC
- Allow UNIX sockets to be used, including passwordless authentication based on user ID like Postgresql
Before I became a core developer, I was a community member. Some of these were fixes I was considering working on. I didn't want to put forth substantial engineering effort to write a patch without some reasonable expectation of payment, and bytemaster was leery of promising payment for a product that hadn't been created (and I'm sure I3 budget woes due to AGS funds hurting from BTC price decline didn't help the situation). Now that I'm a core developer, we've solved the impasse, but most of my time is taken up with pressing issues and new feature development / testing. I haven't even really had time to set up price feeds or a daily pay withdrawal script for my own delegate!
In early days, there were bounties for many tasks, but I believe this was discontinued when it was discovered that managing the bounties was taking too much time away from development.
So I'd like to see a 100% delegate slot used to fund small, self-contained projects like those I listed here. The delegate maintainer would be responsible for putting together a list of tasks and awarding payment, community members could bid on tasks, and the core team would have the final say on merging pull requests into official releases.