Community: Ansible Big PR review days & Office Hours

[gundalow]

Ask not what your community can do for you, ask what you can do for your community!

What are we doing and why?

Ansible is a very popular project by any metric. Our awesome community contributes lots of Pull Requests (PRs) every month. Unfortunately, the volume of incoming PRs means contributors often have to wait a looong time for PRs to be merged, or even reviewed. We want to change that.

The Core Team and Community at large is starting various initiatives under the Contributor Experience umbrella to help address some of the root causes that slow down quality PRs from being merged into Ansible.
We dedicate one day a month to doing a big community review. We hope you can join in!

What we are trying to achieve

• To give potential new community members a place to learn and experiment with Ansible's review process and get feedback
• Improve the process and documentation by getting feedback from you
  
  
  
  • Feedback from people starting their journey with open source is particularly important to us as it helps to identify and improve complicated processes and documentation.
  
  
  • People that have been contributing for a while have already built up this knowledge and have forgotten the "pain of getting started"
  
  
• Give PRs some love
• Identify PRs that could be merged or closed
• Help PRs that are not covered by one of the existing Ansible Working Groups, and therefore may otherwise fall through the cracks

How

• Using a few (to be defined) GitHub searches we will go through PRs and:

  • Provide feedback, which is useful to the PR author
  • Provide testing feedback, which will help maintainers know if it can be merged
  • Merge if good
  • Close, if not needed

• For collections we will be focusing on

  • community.general
  • community.network
  • community.aws

When

• Thursday 29th November 2018 from 0900 UTC till late
• Wednesday 19th December 2018 from 0900 UTC till late
• Tuesday 3rd September from 1000UTC til late
• Thursday 19th September from 1000UTC til late
• Thursday 14th November from 1400UTC til late
• Wednesday 17th June from 1400UTC til late
• Tuesday 1st December 2020 1500UTC
• Thursday 17th December 2020 In my timezone, and calendar invitation

Add to your calendar by clicking the Add to Calendar in the above links

What do I need

• A GitHub account
• A bit of spare time
• IRC client to connect to #ansible-community (see note below about registering)
• Add an I'll be there comment to this issue
• Before you start:
  
  
  
  • Read Ansible's Code of Conduct
  
  
• If you have a bit more time, the following guides can help. If not just ask during the meeting.
  
  
  
  • Skim read Ansible's Contributing Guide - makes it easier to find content later
  
  
  • Read the draft How to do reviews at Ansible document - During the session, as a group, this document will be updated.
  
  
  • Read Ansible coding guidelines
  
  
  • Skim read Ansible's Module guidelines
  
  
  • Want to know more about how to contribute to Ansible, have a look at our on-demand webinar and slides how to make Ansible community contributions.
  
  

Even if you are new to contributing to Ansible, this is an excellent opportunity to get involved!

Our IRC channels may require you to register your nickname. If you receive an error when you connect, see Freenode’s Nickname Registration guide for instructions.

[gundalow]

I'll be there!

[larsks]

I'll be there.

[gregdek]

In.

(LOL, I did this wrong. "I'll be there.")

[Shaps]

I'll be there

[robertdebock]

I'll be there

[resmo]

I'll be there (...)

[chopraaa]

I'll be there

[davegarath]

I'll be there

[apple4ever]

I'll be there

[mbhavya]

I'll be there.

[barlik]

I'll be there.

[felixfontein]

I'll be there (probably only in the evening though)

[jimmybcoder]

I'll be there!

[alexsaezm]

And my axe!

[biohazd]

I’ll be there

[acozine]

I'll be there. Once the sun rises in my timezone and the morning caffeine hits, that is.

[maxamillion]

I'll be there. Probably around 1400 UTC because of my local TZ skew.

[winem]

I'll be there. But probably not before 1130 as I'm currently in Malaysia (UTC+8).

[gundalow]

Great to see so many people signed up, new and familiar faces.

I've updated the description to include some more details about what we are trying to achieve, as well as some background reading (What do I need) as some people have asked for background on how to review and test content.

[rajeevarakkal]

I'll be there

[Saurabh-Thakre]

I'll be there !

Happy Automation :+1:

[richardcs]

Ill be there

[gundalow]

This is happening right now. Hope to see you in #ansible-community on Freenode. If you get a warning that you need to be registered, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration

[gundalow]

Given the great success of Novembers PR review, planning on having the next PR review on Wednesday 19th December from 0900UTC.

[kbreit]

Given the great success of Novembers PR review, planning on having the next PR review on Wednesday 19th December.

Is there a topic or focus?

[gundalow]

@kbreit Good question. For the December Review, we will be focusing on PRs that are not part of a Working Group, as these are the PRs that often don't get reviewed.

The Working Groups will perform their own backlog reviews, as they are the subject matter experts. This will start in early 2019.

[navalkp]

I will be there.

[resmo]

[felixfontein]

I'll be there in the evening. This time earlier than last time :)

[rajeevarakkal]

I will be there.

[Shaps]

I'll be there

[maxamillion]

I'll be there starting at roughly 1400UTC

[winem]

I'll be there.

[hvariant]

Hopefully I'll be there.

[glitchcrab]

I'll be there most of the day (depending on availability)

[gundalow]

We will be starting in 50 minutes, looking forward to seeing you there :)

[xenlo]

I'm there!

[gundalow]

Next Big PR review day is Thursday 21st February 2019 from 1200UTC till late

This time we will be focusing on:

• bugfixes (that aren't covered by any existing Working Group)
• Documentation PRs that need technical input

---

Also, I know people ask "How can I contribute?", well we have a webinar to help you with that
How to Make Your Mark: Ansible Community Contributions at Wed, Jan 30, 2019 9:30AM EST

Have you ever thought about contributing to the Ansible project? If you’re interested in learning about how you can help Ansible grow, tune in to this webinar to learn things like:

• What the Ansible Community is, and what they do
• Where contributions are needed the most
• The best ways to get your pull requests reviewed and merged
• … and much more!

[gundalow]

I'll be there from 1200UTC

[ZoeyCluff]

I'll be there

[cabral404]

I'll be there

[maxamillion]

I'll be there.

[alongchamps]

I'll be there by 1300 UTC.

[hvtuananh]

I'll be there by 1500 UTC.

[gundalow]

How to see you all tomorrow, even if you have just a few mins to spare this all really helps.

[glitchcrab]

@gundalow: it's not tomorrow, it's thursday.. :stuck_out_tongue:

[gundalow]

@glitchcrab Thank you, you passed the test.

Thursday from 1200 UTC

[gundalow]

Starting now, if you have some time over the next ~6 hours, join us in #ansible-community

[gundalow]

Given some discussion in #ansible-devel today, it was proposed that we should do PR review days fortnightly to help get the PR backlog under control.

Looking at the last three months for ansible/ansible:

• 908 PRs created
• 830 PRs merged (or closed without merging)
• Difference: 78/month

So if we can process another 80 PRs/month then we can keep the backlog stead (or better yet decreasing) [1]

.

• Alternate between different days of the week to give people a reasonable chance of attending
• Publicise the dates well in advance (ie just set the dates for the next n-months)
• Work through different GitHub PR queries each time, so give a reasonable chance of hiting different PRs
• Also advertise this as a dropin place for "can you help review my PR"
• Flesh this into a blog post to help recruit/promote

To avoid too much email spam, how about people vote on this issues:
:heart: This sounds like a good idea, lets see how it works out
and/or
:+1: I may be able to attend occasionally to help out.

or
:-1: I don't think this is a good idea

Join the discussion in '#ansible-community on Freenode

[1] Yes, yes, I know it doesn't really work like that, and things very from month to month, though the point is that ~10% increase in merge/close rate will let us breakeven

[tremble]

10% may sometimes feel like a lot, but it's also something that's achievable. Does the core team have any impressions about the common mistakes they see that could be easily avoided?

Personally I've seen a number of PRs where someone from core has taken a look, asked for a small change or a test, and then things have ground to a halt because it's not been re-visited.

[gundalow]

Next PR days will take place in `#ansible-community' on Freenode:

• Tuesday 3rd September from 1000UTC till late
• Thursday 19th September from 1000UTC till late

Please :+1: This issue if you can attend one of the above, just so I can get a sense of turnout. As always even just

I agree with @tremble's comment above that 10% may feed like a lot, though it is possible. If we close/merge an extra 100 PRs a month (so 50/fortnight) then we break even. I think this is possible, especially since there is some low hanging fruit since we've not done a PR review day since the beginning of the year.

[gundalow]

Starting in 40 minutes, see you in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC

[gundalow]

Starting now in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC

[gundalow]

Next PR review day is Thursday 14th November from 1400UTC til late
What's this in my Timezone?

See you in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC

[gundalow]

Starting in just under 3 hours, see you in #ansible-community on Freenode.

[gundalow]

A few updates to share:

• As part of the European Contributors Summit we will have two hackathon days. These can be viewed as "Office Hours" if you'd like to get started with Ansible Collections (or anything else related to Ansible on March 30 & 31st
• Regular PR days will resume once the various Collection repos are up and running, see docs

[gundalow]

Hi all.
The next PR day will be Wednesday 17th June 2020 from 1400UTC

When

Wednesday 17th June 2020 from 1400UTC

What's this in my Timezone?

Where

#ansible-community on Freenode IRC

What

This will be our first session focusing on the new Community Collections:

• community.general
• community.network
• community.crypto

[gundalow]

Starting now in #ansible-community

[gundalow]

Next two PR days

• Tuesday 1st December 2020 1500UTC In my timezone, and calendar invitation
• Thursday 17th December 2020 In my timezone, and calendar invitation

Please give a :+1: on this issue if you can attend either

[gundalow]

Reminder that this is taking place tomorrow, Tuesday 1st December 2020 1500UTC In my timezone, and calendar invitation

[gundalow]

About to start in #ansible-community on Freenode IRC

[prantikb]

I'll be there