Frankly, doing reviews is harder than it sounds. It is the ultimate team sport: a true lockstep with the other developers and architects is required! And a heightened sense of ownership. When I’ve started working on this product many years ago I was told that if I do a review on something it’s mine to deal with. And all the regressions and problems stemming from it become my responsibility as well.
And there’s hopefully even more to come in the next two months, if last year’s trend keeps up!
Now things that stand out in the data:
I can’t really stress this enough! You’re working one some awesome and much needed tasks! Please keep them coming!
We are looking at a rising tide of community contributions!
This is exemplified by the fact that, for the last 3 months, the average pull request processing time has dropped significantly and is staying consistently low.
This is an AWESOME problem to have!
I can assure you we are doing our level best to process these contributions as quickly as possible!
I wanted to share with you all some statistics on the incoming community contributions for the MariaDB server in the last year or so. And some of my thoughts looking at the data.
Becoming a seasoned reviewer also requires a lot of guard-railing and building mutual trust. The best way to learn that is through apprenticeship. This is why we will still be following the “normal” processing of pull requests from our end and will provide preliminary and final reviews for each and every one of these. Hopefully, as the time passes and trust builds, we will be able to take this further and share some of the responsibility too.
This depicts the community pull requests opened or closed each month (the top graph). With an average time (in days) for how long did it take to close these PRs for the month (bottom graph).
I’ve been quietly working on scripting some of my daily routines using the github CLI and the Jira REST API. Thanks to a question by Anna, the visionary MariaDB Foundation CEO, I’ve also created some scripts to fetch and summarize statistics on the incoming community contributions pull requests.
In the last year or so, we have not had that many incoming community contributions in a single month as we did this February! And February is not even over yet!
First of all: THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS!
A picture’s worth a thousand words. So here we go:
So I just want to say “thank you” to all of the MariaDB developers and architects that have helped with reviews and guidance!
But I also hope that our community will be able to help with that too. If you have been subjected to our review process in the past, have the experience and the right mindset to do code reviews and feel ownership of some of the code areas, we call on you: Do you want to see how the world looks like from the other end? Please consider helping with reviewing some of the contributions.
See the numbers of the last 3 months! If we compare them with the same time last year we’re seeing a 3X increase of incoming community contributions!
