Food for thought

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net> 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