IF project updates 15/08/2024

[Joseph Cook]

Hi IF community!

It's been a couple of weeks since our last project update, but we're all back to full capacity now and back to our usual communications schedule!

Announcements

** New release! **

We recently released our v0.6.0 version of Impact Framework.

There are some fairly meaty improvements in this release, including new command line tools (if-csv, if-merge, if-check, if-env), new plugins (time-converter, github-api, eco-ci-api) and a file restructuring. Most important of all is the migration to "phased execution" where we can run certain parts of the pipeline in isolation, making IF more green.

It's a good idea to update your IF version now, as our documentation and other communications will be consistent with these changes, and while we haven't shipped breaking changes, it might get more difficult to keep up if you are on older versions.

** Office hours **

I'm going to try hosting a weekly office hours call on a Wednesday afternoon (UK) with no fixed structure or agenda - just an hour where we can workshop something, unblock your development issues, think through some new ideas or just generally jam on Impact framework.

I'm intending to run this at 1400 - 1500 UK via google meet, starting from next week. 

I'll send a meeting invite out to this mailing list in advance - drop in and say hello if you can!

What we shipped

v0.6.0 included the following notable features:

- if-env: feature to bootstrap dev environments

- if-check: verifies a manifest was correctly executed

- if-merge: merges multiple manifests into one 

- if-csv: takes yaml putput and reformats to csv

- explain: lists all known parameter metadata in output file

- phased execution: enables execution of specific parts of the pipeline in isolation

And there's also:

- time-converter plugin: a generic plugin for converting between different time units

- github-plugin: plugin for retrieving metrics from Github's API

- eco-ci plugin: plugin for retrieving data about CI/CD energy expenditure

What we're doing next

We're gradually slowing down the rate that we ship features and instead we're starting to focus on UX improvements and building out case studies. 

We're nearing the point where the main features we want in the framework are shipped, and we want to focus on refinements and growing adoption, until we get feature requests from you, our community. 

Therefore, we're working on onboarding people that want to write manifests for their open source projects and dogfooding our own tech by writing them for our own products too. We'll be publishing our experiences as case studies soon!

Cheers

Joseph

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Joseph Cook

R&D Lead 

Green Software Foundation

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