[OT] Re: How are you enjoying DConf? And where to go next?

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 13:10:37 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Please curb off-topic discussions and mark them with [OT], 
> yadda yadda yadda. Thanks! -- Andrei

When people complain about the D forums, they aren't complaining 
about infrequent OT stuff. Random tangents about the weather 
naturally fizzle out after five or six posts and don't leave hard 
feelings.

The bigger problem we have is that things get discussed without a 
plan of action that actually gets followed through on. How can we 
forget the `virtual` debacle? That's the real spam on the forum: 
a long thread where things are discussed, people believe a 
decision is reached, code gets implemented.... then all 
mysteriously dropped.

On the other hand, new things pop up from apparently nowhere. We 
have these roadmap documents twice a year but they don't seem to 
be very meaningful.

What I think would help on the forum is if actual work is 
discussed in real time, something like the main contributors to 
check in every other day and tell us what they're working on and 
what they're working toward. No need to discuss it at length, 
that'd get counter-productive, but just take a few minutes for 
you and Walter and others to say "I'm working on big-O right now 
which will help with containers, and plan to continue that 
throughout the week." or "I decided to shift gears and play with 
64 bit exception handling because it will help C++ interop."

Like the agile stand up meeting idea, though even less formal. 
Just so the community has *frequent* updates on the short-term 
direction to complement the longer term direction laid out in the 
2016 H1/H2 documents.

Not so anyone gets to input on it, but just so we feel inspired. 
My review of merged pull requests at the end of the week sort of 
gets there, but it is hard for me to get past the surface, I can 
only see a summary after-the-fact with little indication of why 
or how it fits into your development plans.

Think how much more productive the forum would appear if people - 
including you and Walter! - actually talked about ongoing 
projects on it instead of primarily just proposals.