Open Stack

Note: thread intentionally broken, this is really a different topic.

On 08/27/2014 02:30 PM, Doug Hellmann wrote:>
> On Aug 27, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Chris Dent <chdent at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 27 Aug 2014, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>>
>>> I have found it immensely helpful, for example, to have a written set
>>> of the steps involved in creating a new library, from importing the
>>> git repo all the way through to making it available to other projects.
>>> Without those instructions, it would have been much harder to split up
>>> the work. The team would have had to train each other by word of
>>> mouth, and we would have had constant issues with inconsistent
>>> approaches triggering different failures. The time we spent building
>>> and verifying the instructions has paid off to the extent that we even
>>> had one developer not on the core team handle a graduation for us.
>>
>> +many more for the relatively simple act of just writing stuff down
>
> "Write it down.” is my theme for Kilo.

I definitely get the sentiment. "Write it down" is also hard when you
are talking about things that do change around quite a bit. OpenStack as
a whole sees 250 - 500 changes a week, so the interaction pattern moves
around enough that it's really easy to have *very* stale information
written down. Stale information is even more dangerous than no
information some times, as it takes people down very wrong paths.

I think we break down on communication when we get into a conversation
of "I want to learn gate debugging" because I don't quite know what that
means, or where the starting point of understanding is. So those
intentions are well meaning, but tend to stall. The reality was there
was no road map for those of us that dive in, it's just understanding
how OpenStack holds together as a whole and where some of the high risk
parts are. And a lot of that comes with days staring at code and logs
until patterns emerge.

Maybe if we can get smaller more targeted questions, we can help folks
better? I'm personally a big fan of answering the targeted questions
because then I also know that the time spent exposing that information
was directly useful.

I'm more than happy to mentor folks. But I just end up finding the "I
want to learn" at the generic level something that's hard to grasp onto
or figure out how we turn it into action. I'd love to hear more ideas
from folks about ways we might do that better.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net