89 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
89 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
I am submitting my candidacy for Swift PTL for the Newton cycle.
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### Community growth
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During the Mitaka cycle, we've seen the community grow from about 440
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contributors to 531 today. That's a 20% growth in the last six months.
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This growth rate is huge, and I'm really happy to see all the new
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people coming into the community. New contributors bring new ideas,
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new use cases, and fresh eyes on old problems. This is the hallmark of
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a healthy community.
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New contributors reflect the broader picture of what's going on with
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Swift, too. When we see new contributors from companies who are
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already actively participating in the community, it shows that they
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are using Swift more. When new companies join the community for the
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first time, it shows new places where Swift is being used to solve
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real-world storage problems. Both situations are exciting. Swift is
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growing. More people are using it to store more data and solve more
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storage problems.
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As I've said many times before, my vision for Swift is that it will be
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used by everyone, every day, even if people don't realize it.
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Community growth is one way we can see that this is happening today.
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### Tracking the community
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One thing I've been working on over the last year is tracking our
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community and finding ways to understand it and help it continue to
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grow. You can see some of this work in the graphs below.
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http://d.not.mn/total_contribs.png
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http://d.not.mn/active_contribs.png
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I've been working on a few more interesting graphs and metrics too.
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I've shared one of these before: visualizing individual contributor
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activity over time. You can see the results at
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http://d.not.mn/contrib_activity.png. This is a rather large graph,
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but it's fairly simple to read. The x-axis is time (from Swift's
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initial release to today). Each line on the y-axis is a person's
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activity in Swift. Blue boxes are for authoring a patch; green boxes
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are for a review. This graph has been invaluable in helping understand
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who is contributing to the project and what activity active
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contributors are engaged in. One thing I've learned is that there is a
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class of contributor who has been involved for a long time, but is
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only active infrequently. Most of these people are operators who are
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normally running production clusters but occasionally need to submit a
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patch or review upstream.
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Another thing I've worked on is a way to find out what the community
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as a whole thinks is important. We can start to find a lot of this
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info from information we already have. For example, we can get a list
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of every patch that every contributor has starred to see if there is
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any commonality between them. The patches that are more often starred
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are likely to be more important, from the community perspective.
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I've taken that basic idea, along with some further parsing of
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information from gerrit, and created a review dashboard. It's going to
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keep changing, but you can see its current incarnation at
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http://not.mn/swift/swift_community_dashboard.html (and linked in
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the #openstack-swift channel topic). So far, I've seen this dashboard
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result in a dramatic decrease in the number of unreviewed patches, and
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as the dashboard improves, I expect it to lead to a similar
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improvement in review times for important patches.
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### Current struggles
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Tracking the community (both with metrics like above and from simply
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talking to people) shines a light on common problems in the community.
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Two of the most-often raised issues are that of long patch review
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times and review prioritization. We've been improving both of these
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with several tools in the past, and we're currently in a much better
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place than we've been in the past. As PTL, I feel it's my duty to
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enable the community to solve these problems. I will continue to
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improve the tools we have and create new tools as necessary so that we
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know what's going on, what to work on, and make every contributor
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effective.
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### Goals for newton
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Looking forward to the Newton cycle, I want to see three things happen.
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1. Increased contributor growth
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2. Progress on significant code efforts, including crypto, improved
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global clusters, and improved performance
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3. Better tools and info for community prioritization and community tracking
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The community is well-positioned to meet these goals, and I will be
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honored to continue to serve you as PTL for OpenStack Swift.
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