[HQ news] Vanilla has a new R&D lead (spoilers: it's me)
Linc
Admin
Last week I was promoted to lead for the R&D / product team at Vanilla. It's a position that did not exist previously; Todd remains the CPO (Chief Product Officer) and I still report to him. The difference between the jobs is that the product vision remains Todd's responsibility. Mine is how & when we get there - and keeping that synced with the rest of the company - and you folks! (Or as I enjoy thinking about it: the Keeper of Bits and the Keeper of Truth 
)
We continue to have a very lean development team, and a lot of our bandwidth continues to be onboarding, support, and internal work. My most pressing concern at the moment is handling the results of @mtschirs' impromptu but extensive security audits over the last month. I suppose that is a good problem to have! 
I'm also going to be poking @beckyvb and @initvector to interact with the community more, especially on GitHub (where their usernames are the same) so we can coordinate our efforts better. I'm pushing the idea that all product issues get put on the public tracker so they don't languish internally (I've just found a few that sat in a gloomy hole for years and transferred them today).
Our roadmap is never going to be 100% transparent because some of it is necessarily cloud-only (something about "business value" 
), but the next two "big" things we're working on are going in the core product. So expect to hear more about that once we've firmed up where we're headed, and of course you'll see them develop on a feature branch once we get going.
And our roadmap includes lots of smaller goodies, like the "Default Avatars" settings page that @beckyvb just shipped last week. 
That level of the roadmap we're going to be talking a lot about, and we've made a 'Roadmap' label for the GitHub repo to signify which things are getting voted up internally for a dev to work on in the near term.
And rest assured: 2.2's gold release is a top concern on this side too. Backporting is the worst. 
The security issues raised have caused a bit of a stumble in our schedule, but we'll be back on our feet shortly.
That's the latest from HQ!
Comments
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That's cool.
One idea is to have someone that works exclusively on things like community support, developer program, docs and all that jazz. So others can focus on other things.
I think it can be beneficial to your business. Especially if it increases the number of contributors. Lack of docs is a turn off for a developer choosing a platform.
I understand that you are spread thinly though.
grep is your friend.
Documentation is definitely going to be a perennial focus going forward. I pushed that topic when I was at HQ earlier this month, too. However, I really don't want to silo a developer like that. Every developer should be writing good docs and interacting with the community as part of every sprint.
I'm the one that's ultimately responsible for it happening.
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I wasn't suggesting it was the sole responsibility. I think having someone in charge of the developer program is a good idea.
phpBB takes their developer program really seriously (like very extreme degree code review), I'm not suggesting that, but having an oversight is no bad thing.
grep is your friend.
Super good news @Linc. I know i was one of the more terrible children of the community the last years demanding stronger OS. But i see my parents grow on the community aspect a lot recently. I love that, maybe some old white beards are returning because of that new direction... surely some new people will board the ship. I love every policy to unleash the power of your SaS OS community.