Go quiet weeks - Dec 17 to Jan 3

[Russ Cox]

Hi all,

The golang-dev@ mailing list and GitHub issue tracker will be quiet from December 17 to January 3 (two weeks plus a bit), 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 quiet time is the next two weeks, extended because it's the end of the year when lots of people take time off anyway. And it starts on Friday because this Friday is a day off at Google.

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

Last time there was some discussion about what is and isn't expected. As a recap, there are two goals for these quiet weeks:

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.

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.

If you're working, we want you to have a productive week too, and we trust your judgement. 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 on January 4. 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 it if you can hold those and wait to post them until the quiet is over.

As always, we appreciate all the work done by Go contributors here and on the issue tracker, and we hope that the quiet time 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