IPFS Project Operations - Q4 Async Retro

Alan (Core Implementations)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?
*

What was not achieved?
*

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?
*

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?
*

What went wrong?
*

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

Arkadiy (Collabs)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?
*

What was not achieved?
*

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?
*

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?
*

What went wrong?
*

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

David (Research)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?
*

What was not achieved?
*

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?
*

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?
*

What went wrong?
*

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

Dietrich (Collabs, Browsers)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?

  • Browsers: Brave v1 of IPFS support shipped, was included in Brave 1.0, and mentioned in both official communication and response coverage of that release. Opera were builds received, tested, iterated on, and mostly where we need to be for Feb launch. We set the stage for shipping our browser work by communicating strategy and status in the IPFS Browsers Update blog post in October
  • Community strategy for 2020: We reviewed needs with stakeholders and leaders. We finalized the Community Manager job description and launched the position on Lever. We did some early work on focus for 2020 around community participation in core implementations and how to support our close community collaborators who contribute to the core.
  • IPFS Comms Runbook: Molly created the Q4 Comms Plan with guidance for communicating launches, the Comms Template, the Comms Lessons Learned, and drafted the Comms Runbook.
  • Non-OKR stuff?
    • Sec review
    • IPFS browser design guidelines

What was not achieved?

  • Browsers: We pushed communicating Brave v1 until after holidays to not compete with other IPFS/FIL/PL announcements. Opera pushed back IPFS support to Feb launch.
  • Community strategy for 2020: I did not deliver a single cohesive community strategy plan. Given the 2020 H1 goal demands a rewrite of our community approach re core contributions, maybe that's some time not spent on the wrong thing. But still, I'd planned to write something up that we could iterate on.
  • IPFS Comms Runbook: I was DRI and did not finish the draft runbook that Molly started.

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?

  • Launch comms for Brave and Opera
  • Community strategy plan formalized in a document
  • Finalize comms runbook

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?

  • Both Brave and Opera were able to ship, with our input and help and coding (in Brave's case with Lidel's work)
  • We have shared understanding of highest priority needs for community manager, and we're ready to source.
  • The comms plan and document for managing it that Molly put together seems to be working well.
  • Sec review completed
  • Got some long term work kicked off through contract designer

What went wrong?

  • Opera changed the schedule on us

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

Hac (GUI)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?

  • Desktop and Web UI came to a stable point where we should not be putting effort into adding more features, but stabilizing what we have and make sure everything always works.
  • Web UI 2.6 and 2.7 were released with a lot of bug fixes and we've also added some features for the peers page to make it more user friendly and let you find whoever is close to you.
  • Desktop 0.10 released with the newest Web UI and some features:
    • Startup icon on Linux
    • Copy link to clipboard when drag'n'droping the icon

What was not achieved?

  • The testing part was not finished and the work was handed over to @lidel since I moved the team.

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?

  • Finish the testing of Web UI and Desktop and keep stabilizing both products through testing/bug fixing.

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?

  • I think that overall everything went reasonably well. IPFS Desktop and IPFS Web UI are entering maintenance mode, but we must make sure it is always updated and working.
  • I moved to Testground! I have been actually enjoying the project more than I thought I would initially. There are, of course, a lot of points I still want to touch on, mainly related to go-ipfs and explore some the work being done on the IPLD area.

What went wrong?

  • I would say there was something specific that went wrong, but I'm concerned with the future of IPFS Desktop mainly since I don't have as much time for it anymore. I noticed @lidel's taking over some work on web ui, including testing, which is awesome.

Improvements? (Suggestions)

  • IPFS Desktop should keep being a priority to introduce people to IPFS world.

What support from PL would’ve helped?

  • N/A

What got blocked? By whom / why?

  • N/A

Hugo (Core implementations)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?
*

What was not achieved?
*

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?
*

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?
*

What went wrong?
*

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

Lidel (Collabs, Browsers)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?

  • Browsers: Brave shipped v1 of the IPFS integration (one-click-install via Settings, opt-in embedded js-ipfs with real Gateway). We communicated our Browser work so far and high level roadmap via a blog post. Opera builds were reviewed and a test suite for evaluating protocol handler support in browsers got created to make it easier in the future.
  • Tests improved: ipfs-webui e2e tests against real go-ipfs/js-ipfs will help to safeguard us against regressions in the future.
  • Non-OKR

What was not achieved?

  • Tests
    • no e2e for ipfs-companion or ipfs-webui runnning in ipfs-companion in Brave yet
  • cidv1b32 / Origin isolation of content roots
    • support for CIDs in /ipns/ content paths did not land in go-ipfs
    • same with support for subdomain gateways in go/js-ipfs
  • Brave
    • blogpost about embedded js-ipfs pushed to Q1
  • Wikipedia snapshots did not got updated
  • addressing specs did not land in ipfs/specs

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?

  • Browsers SIG had some sync time to align and plan
  • good relationship with Brave
  • got great contributions to IPFS Companion from a community member
  • we moved away from low level pins to MFS in our GUIs
  • slow but steady progress on cidv1
  • Ethereum ecosystem (ENS, Metamask, libs) adopts/supports CIDv1
  • docs improved

What went wrong?

  • Got sick after Lab Week and too long time to recover :(
  • Hac moved to other team :'(
  • Bit too much context switching at times due to repos/projects without or losing a maintainer, difficult to maintian "Inbox Zero"
    • As a result IPFS Companion did not get all necessary attention, some PR reviews took to long on my end, and E2E PR got paused due to more pressing matters
  • Google: a growing time sink
  • Origin isolation turned out to be a bigger priority than we thought, security-wise
  • Not enough time for Wikipedia, and other smaller projects (cohosting, Web Package), all eneded up on the backburner
  • We still need to use ws-star in the browser

Improvements? (Suggestions)

  • in the long run, high impact projects like ipfs-webui, ipfs-desktop need full time maintainers. ah-hoc life-support is not sustainable.

What support from PL would’ve helped?

  • identify choke points and unburden high impact stakeholders somehow (encouraging delegation?)

What got blocked? By whom / why?

  • things were slow around libp2p: high impact PR reviews took long time, feature prioritization is still unclear

Molly (Project, Comms, Collabs)

(1) Review OKRs & Overall Progress

What was achieved?

  • We collected lots of awesome 2020 themes from the community to understand their needs!

What was not achieved?
*

What needs to be achieved/finalized in the next Quarter?
*

(2) Talk about Learnings

What went well?
*

What went wrong?
*

Improvements? (Suggestions)
*

What support from PL would’ve helped?
*

What got blocked? By whom / why?
*

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