Re: How can we decrease the cognitive overhead for contributors?

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Fri, Sep 08, 2023 at 04:20:30PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Josselin Poiret <dev@jpoiret.xyz> writes:
> 
> > Regarding the “mom argument”, I would disagree and say that this is
> > completely related: interruptions are more costly, you're more likely to
> > have less attention span, and overall you probably don't want to commit
> > to 20 steps just to send a contribution.
> 
> That’s exactly it.
> 
> I’m a parent working a full-time job and I’m easily overwhelmed by what
> I would have considered to be simple processes 20 years ago.  All these
> simple and totally “easy” processes add up and – oops it’s 11:30pm
> already and I had been feeling exhausted since 10am…
> 
> There’s an hour before I pass out — what will I do with it?  This thread
> is about how we can reduce overhead; for me that would mean to have
> certain checks automated, or to have commit messages be generated so I
> only need to read them to sign off on them, etc.
> 
> We all may gain from streamlining our processes.  Personally, I see the
> biggest problem in a lack of effective tools for reviewers, which
> results in stretching out contribution interactions over weeks, months,
> or years.  This, to me, would be a way to increase the weight of the
> rewards on the unbalanced scales that are overwhelmed by chores on the
> other side.

On the other hand, if we do manage to automate writing of commit
messages, it makes one less thing for committers to manually fix before
pushing the commit.

The last couple of contributions I pushed had green checks on
qa.guix.gnu.org and I felt at a bit of a loss what to do while checking
it over. After checking that it was in fact green I double-checked the
commit message and then also some of the layout of the commit and the
package itself, and made sure it passed `guix lint`. More resources for
qa.guix.gnu.org would let us build more patches more quickly.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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