On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Jonathan "Duke" Leto <[email protected]> wrote: > If you were being paid to hack on Parrot, which things would you be expected > to > work on?
The crux of this question is the idea that when we volunteer to work on Parrot, we work on the kinds of things that we like to do, but if we were getting paid we would be expected to do things the projects needs, even if nobody likes to do those things. It's an exercise in trying to figure out what the project needs most, which volunteers are not currently doing (or not doing enough of). Some things come to my mind: * Keeping documentation, examples, PDDs, tests, and other meta-materials complete and up to date. * Creating new learning materials for prospective users * Maintaining and improving project infrastructure (website, trac, github, mailing lists, smolder, buildbot, irc, etc) * Profiling, tuning, and optimizing various bits of Parrot * Dealing with Trac ticket backlogs, Deprecation backlogs, cleaning up XXX and TODO notes in the code, etc. * Finding, evaluating, and maybe fixing SKIP and TODO tests * Maintaining, cleaning, fixing, and improving infrastructural projects like Plumage * Continuous integration infrastructure, HLL and cross-HLL testing, etc. * Maintaining and improving portability to various platforms Those are the things that need to be done and aren't being done or aren't being done enough by our volunteers. On top of that, there are several development-related tasks that need to be done and could be spearheaded or accelerated by a paid developer: Lorito and JIT, concurrency, improved object model, improved container/value semantics, improve/clean packfiles and object serialization, cleaning/fixing/removing/replacing IMCC, Fixing various inefficiencies in PCC, profiling and other development tools, improved NCI functionality and bindings to important libraries, pushing along compiler projects for "important" languages, etc. I think all these things and more would be expected of a paid parrot developer, at least a developer paid by the Parrot Foundation itself. A private company paying a developer to hack on Parrot might have different priorities. --Andrew Whitworth _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
