Hi, are all contributions on hold right now? Is there a plan to open them again?
I had some bigger ideas about other languages, but I understand that’s a no go right now. I had a few PRs open with mentoring notes for months but that’s perhaps lower priority so I’m happy to remove them.
But how about the exercises, especially the existing ones? Some of them are great, and some of them I think are worth discussing to consider the balance between educational value vs accidental complexity and unnecessary head scratching that is not helping with learning a specific language?
Is any of the above possible to at least discuss? If so what is the best way to do it?
Hey! For more info on them being closed, you can see this blog post Freeing our maintainers - if you’ve got further specific questions about that after reading, please do ask them in this thread
Best way to discuss things is to open relevant threads here for now. Basically, we’re finding that discussions here first are working well and then when conclusions are reached, we can then open PRs etc. We’re very open to those discussions.
Could you link to these and I’ll see if I can get them merged :)
Thanks for such a quick response, Jeremy. Don’t worry about those PRs for now. I have had a look at the post you shared and it makes sense. Protecting the time and passion of existing contributors is important. At the same time the pause on everything might be discouraging the new ones (I know it stopped me). It is a balance you will have to find and choose to make it work for exercism (rather than me)
To reduce the strain I’ll think carefully about the thoughts I had and start a specific thread. I’ll also reach out to Jonathan to see if it not to late to take part in the discussions as suggested in the article.
Yeah. Our main issue has been that lots of people intend to help out, and our maintainers put a lot of effort into supporting their onboarding, then they lose interest quickly. This has happened literally hundreds of times in the last year. So it became unsustainable.
What has, however, worked, has been people chatting on these forums and then if their interest is maintained, it’s clearer for us to see the people who are worth putting the energy into onboarding and then doing that. Ironically, we’ve actually had an increase in high-value contributions since we paused the general contributions as some new, committed, people have taken steps to get involved. We’ve launched 5 new tracks this year already as a result! So there’s definitely some light at the end of the tunnel of this.
(A good example is this thread with lots of enthusiasm, but not yet any actual progress on the first small step. Our traditional approach would have been to have created and boostrapped new repos, done some pairing, and then often been hit by silence afterwards. So once that thread gets to a good stage and the key contributors have made themselves known through their work, we’ll then invest the time into onboarding etc.)
Really appreciate this attitude - thank you - and look forward to the thread(s)
