quiet week next week - Sep 25-Oct 3

[Russ Cox]

Hi all,

The golang-dev@ mailing list and GitHub issue tracker will be quiet from September 18 to September 25 to October 3 (next week, plus weekends), with no important conversations happening, to let people disconnect and recharge for a bit.

We tried this back in June, and it was well received, so we've decided to make these a regular feature of our development cycle: we will aim to do about four single weeks per year, toward the middle of each change window and the middle of each freeze. The next one is next week. I will try to post more advance notice here for the subsequent ones.

We will also post a pinned issue on the issue tracker Friday night.

As always, we appreciate all the work done by Go contributors here and on the issue tracker, and we hope that the quiet week can serve as an opportunity for some of you to disconnect and recharge as well. Thanks for being part of this project with us.

Best,

Russ, for the Go team

[Daniel Martí]

I think this worked really well last time,
and making it a regular occurrence seems like a good idea.
Hope you all get some rest :)

> and we hope that the quiet week can serve as an
> opportunity for some of you to disconnect and recharge as well.

Just one question in terms of etiquette:
is it expected that we try to keep GitHub/Gerrit noise to a minimum?
I would not actively ping people for updates during the week,
but I'd still open/reply to issues and CLs as usual.
I imagine that others would reasonably catch up after the quiet week.

It's tricky because I don't want their quiet week to be followed by a
larger-than-usual backlog of stuff to read.
At the same time, calendars sometimes don't align. I'd rather not
observe this quiet week, as it's one of the few active weeks I've got
left before the freeze is upon us.

While I'm here: I'm really liking the new proposal review minutes format!
Much easier to now keep track of what's in what stage.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33502#issuecomment-844365474

[ben...@gmail.com]

While I'm here: I'm really liking the new proposal review minutes format!
Much easier to now keep track of what's in what stage.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33502#issuecomment-844365474

Agreed! But I didn't know what you were referring to at first, because that's a link to a comment with the old format. Here's the new format: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33502#issuecomment-925310615

-Ben

[Russ Cox]

[Changed subject, split from quiet week thread]

Thanks! Glad to hear it. We've definitely outgrown the old format.
Any other suggestions about how to make them more useful are always welcome.

I'm also aware that GitHub uses different Markdown renderers

for email and web display, so I try to make them look OK in both,

since I expect many people follow them from email.

Best,
Russ

[Russ Cox]

Hi Daniel,

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:11 AM Daniel Martí <mv...@mvdan.cc> wrote:

I think this worked really well last time,
and making it a regular occurrence seems like a good idea.
Hope you all get some rest :)

> and we hope that the quiet week can serve as an
> opportunity for some of you to disconnect and recharge as well.

Just one question in terms of etiquette:
is it expected that we try to keep GitHub/Gerrit noise to a minimum?
I would not actively ping people for updates during the week,
but I'd still open/reply to issues and CLs as usual.
I imagine that others would reasonably catch up after the quiet week.

It's tricky because I don't want their quiet week to be followed by a
larger-than-usual backlog of stuff to read.
At the same time, calendars sometimes don't align. I'd rather not
observe this quiet week, as it's one of the few active weeks I've got
left before the freeze is upon us.

Thanks for asking.

It's a little bit easier to reason from the goals than to try to enumerate hard rules.

There are two goals for the quiet week:

1. Create time for people to disconnect and take a real break,
    without worrying that they will need to catch up on what they missed when they return.
2. Create time for people who keep working to do deep work,
    without all the usual interruptions, including online discussions.

Being quiet helps those of us taking a break and those of us still working.

Clearly getting work done quietly is great, and we don't want to stop that.

We've used an example that if a couple people agree beforehand that the deep work
they want to do next week is some kind of collaboration, like meeting to talk through
a thorny design doc they are drafting, or pair programming sessions, that's totally fine,
as long as that's how they both want to use the week and as long as no one else
who would have wanted to be involved will feel like they missed it.

By the same token, it's definitely fine to file most issues and mail most CLs:

we don't want everyone to have to queue up a whole bunch of things to send the next Monday. 

On the other hand, if you have an issue or a CL that you think might spark a discussion

that people will regret having missed or need to catch up on when they return,

then we'd appreciate if you can hold those and wait to post them until the following week.

For example, last time, I finished the memory model write-ups but then waited to post them.

(This time, I'm disconnecting entirely and taking an at-home vacation.)

If you're working, we want you to have a productive week too, and we trust your judgement.

Thanks!

Best,

Russ

[Daniel Martí]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 23:05:15 -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> Thanks for asking.
> It's a little bit easier to reason from the goals than to try to enumerate
> hard rules.

Thanks for the quick and thorough reply! Makes sense.
I think the basic idea I'll remember is "don't grab other people's
attention during quiet week".

Maybe they should be called "focus week", even if your focus is rest :)
I think my confusion at "quiet" was that it might mean proper silence.