Fabrice & team,
A bit past the goals deadline, but I hope I can still be useful :)
On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 04:59:05PM -0700, Fabrice Florin wrote:
- Activities
This year, we propose to invest our time on these main activities: • Structured Data: improve the way we store metadata — an important goal, because most other features depend on it. • Critical Bugs: fix urgent bugs in our infrastructure -- and become more familiar with our entire code base, including:
- Image scalers, Core media handling, TimedMediaHandler, Media backend storage, Media Viewer, etc.
• Features: develop or improve user-facing projects, including:
- Upload Wizard -- our main user-facing project this year (includes Commons Upgrade and Modal Tool for other sites)
- Other Features -- Media Viewer 0.3, File Notifications, File Page, Kaltura Player Upgrade, Campaign Tools
I notice that you've split the roadmap into "critical bugs" and "features". What exactly do you mean by "critical" here? Is there time allocated for non-critical but also non-feature work, e.g. infrastructure/architecture design?
Our current media infrastructure is getting old, has been traditionally under-resourced and hence has accumulated technical debt over the years.
As an example, there are currently four RFCs related to thumbnails and I'm sure opinions on their characterization as "critical" would vary. Additionally, as you know, we've had some outage lately that can and have been dealt with by deploying hotfixes, but unless we invest time on a properly scalable & secure architecture these issues will keep cropping up. Our thumbnailing architecture could surely use some love :)
My impression is that the team has been doing a bit of both, as time permits; is this the plan going forward as well? I've discussed various ideas with the team (mostly Gilles) and I know there is both the will and the necessary combination of skill and experience to do those larger changes, so I'm wondering if there's going to be time allocated for this, this upcoming FY.
Thanks, Faidon