Impact Framework updates 13/06/24

[Joseph Cook]

Hi IFers

Here are your Thursday updates from the Impact Framework!

Announcements

We have launched the IF Explorer, where you can explore the universe of IF plugins and add your own!

We have a new IF release: v0.4.0 is now available! You can upgrade your IF version now to get the latest features such as csv-lookup, debug logs and more!

Now that we have migrated our entire standard library of plugins over to IF builtins, we have deprecated the if-plugins repository. Your pipelines using those plugins will still work for now, but we will not be actively maintaining them and the repository will be archived soon. You can achieve the same functionality using our IF builtins.

What are we working on?

Our developers are putting the finishing touches on some substantial upgrades to our error handling and logging protocols to make it easier to debug IF.

Meanwhile I have been writing up our new epic tasks as issues on our board. We've had the epics in the discussion forum for over a week now and gathered some very helpful feedback (you are still welcome to participate in the discussion - check the board here). Now we're really fleshing out the details and getting ready to start working on some substantial updates, including:

- separating out the execution into three distinct phases, making IF execution more green, more reproducible and more auditable

- updating how we handle parameter metadata, including unit definitions.

- migrating exhaust functions to scripts so we can keep IF itself feature minimal

- simplifying how we configure plugins in manifest files

New features

We shipped a new csv-lookup plugin that allows you to grab data from CSV files in the local filesystem or on the internet. 

We added a new section to our documentation showing how to construct manifests for common patterns such as calculating an SCI score, looking up metadata about a cloud instance from a CSV and applying the Teads CPU power curve. This will help you to migrate from the old plugins to prioritising the new builtin generic features that come bundled with IF.

Most importantly, we shipped the new IF Explorer website!

You can use this new site to browse or search for the plugins you need for your pipelines, or submit your own plugins to make them discoverable by other people in the IF community!

Ways to contribute

We are grateful for some substantial community contributions over the past few weeks.

This includes users who have raised bug reports, contributed fixes and added new information to our docs website.

Now we have the IF Explorer website, you can contribute by building and submitting plugins and helping to grow the IF plugin universe! 

We are always grateful for updates and fixes to our documentation website.

If you want to contribute code,we've added several new open issues to our board that you can jump into. There are some bug fixes that would make great first issues, such as

- this one

- this one

some great introductory feature issues, such as

- adding emojis to if-diff output

- enriching the error messages emitted by the CLI

There are some more in-depth open issues available too:

browse open issues


That's it for now, see you all online!

Joseph

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Joseph Cook

Product Owner: Impact Framework, 

Green Software Foundation

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