This Week in D

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 10:22:35 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I liked this line
>
> "And, the thread many of you have been waiting to hear about... 
> "

Yeah, there were a few people who asked me what I was going to 
say on it. (BTW, the D community as I see it, isn't just the 
forums. I also am on the Stack Overflow questions, the IRC 
channel (which is currently down apparently, freenode keeps 
disconnecting me, ugh), sometimes FB/reddit/etc., and there's 
quite a few people who privately email me. And, of course, the 
people I actually talk to regularly are just a small fraction of 
the community as a whole too, and TWID's readership.

Sometimes, we on the forum think we're everybody, but we're 
really just the upper 1% of D's users in terms of activity level. 
We, generally speaking, aren't even the ones who *use* it most, 
just the ones who talk the most.)


But since the impression I got was a lot of people wanted to hear 
about it, I put something up.



So, at the weekly work meeting I talked about in my last post, 
one of the questions the manager always asks is "what can we 
improve", and he usually starts by saying something he felt he 
did wrong this week. Then the floor is open to all of us to 
suggest process changes or whatever to help prevent whatever we 
felt went wrong this week from happening next week.

The goal of this isn't to say "Brian is an idiot", but rather to 
say like "I'd like if Brian chatted a bit more so we know what's 
on his mind because I didn't understand why he made that change 
on Wednesday".

The goal is to get our problems in the open so we can talk about 
fixing it rather than to just hate each other. It is great that 
the manager often starts with a bit of self-criticism because 
that shows that he is open to it too, that we should be free to 
say whatever is on our minds, that it is his responsibility to 
keep things flowing smoothly and it isn't a blame game nor a suck 
up to the boss moment.



My last comment that we need better communication is along those 
same lines. There were a lot of misunderstandings in that thread 
that could be solved with more proactive communication. But, 
also, let's be fair, Andrei is a busy man and can't be seriously 
expected to read every post on every forum. (I didn't know much 
about the SDLang decision either, though I knew it was in for 
some time because I saw support requests come up. But I'm not 
really a dub user personally and don't follow their forums.)

So, we as a community, need to find some good way to distill 
these things to a list of things that might happen that busy 
people can keep up with and discuss before it becomes too big.


I'm trying to provide that with This Week in D, but we can surely 
do better!


tl;dr: as an action item on this, please email me if I forget to 
mention some decision in the Major Changes section. At least we 
can list things there and hopefully see+talk about it before it 
becomes too late.