My semi-regular LLVM JIT updates got derailed last year, but I’m looking to start them up again.
This time, rather than a “weekly” mailer, I think a better format may be monthly office hours and a corresponding monthly update post. I’m basing this on impressions that I formed while writing the weekly mails:
The weekly mailers often did not generate much feedback / interaction. A live discussion may be better for that (and office hours have been requested by a couple of people on the #jit discord already).
Progress on the JIT tends to be bursty – some weeks nothing happens, other weeks there are significant changes. A monthly update is more likely to provide interesting news in each post.
If you are interested in receiving LLVM JIT updates I would be interested to get your opinion on the schedule (weekly vs monthly), and whether you would be interested in attending monthly office hours.
maybe just more sporadic updates when there’s interesting things happening, with a month between updates being sort of a backstop in case it’s a bit quiet? In terms of fostering engagement, having an update closer to when things are happening, so they can get involved may be helpful.
I am always interested in receiving updates, whatever the frequency or regularity. A lot of the more recent changes to JIT are not directly relevant to what we do with it, so I may well not reply, but I am still interested, and on the lookout for changes that are relevant.
Hi Lang, I think the semi-regular updates were great. Monthly posts sound like a nice successor. I don’t think higher frequency is worth the effort.
I agree that the weekly mailers didn’t trigger a lot of feedback or interaction, but that might be just natural. Right now, I am not working on mainline and so I’d take notice of all the news, but I won’t have a direct use-case that’d allow me to give feedback. Other people may be in similar situations. However, these posts can still be very useful. I remember looking up this one a lot of times, because it did document the out-of-process parameters of the llvm-jitlink tool at a time when the only other reference was the implementation:
If monthly update posts establish some kind of “continuous documentation”, that would be a big win for everyone. Plus: If updates are small and focused, they might make a good resource to link when answering questions on #jit discord.
Office hours might be a good addition and worth trying if you can juggle the timezones. If they happen monthly and overlap with CET, I could offer to help running them occasionally. (Though I can probably only answer a fraction of questions.)
I assume it would be like a virtual version of a dev meeting round table? In my experience our round tables tend to converge into 1-on-1 conversations. JIT use-cases are diverse and so are the issues of people who build them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe something to be aware of.
It sounds like the regular updates were providing value – I’ll plan to start again with the first monthly update post next week.
Office hours might be a good addition and worth trying if you can juggle the timezones…
Ok – let’s trial office hours in September. We can use next week’s update post to discuss the date/time. I think we can come up with something that will work for CET (perhaps inspired by the schedule for @vvassilev’s CaaS monthly meetings).
I assume it would be like a virtual version of a dev meeting round table? In my experience our round tables tend to converge into 1-on-1 conversations. JIT use-cases are diverse and so are the issues of people who build them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe something to be aware of.
I think you’re right. The standard office hours format is Q&A with the code owner. I’ll also encourage people to flag areas that they’re interested in ahead of the meeting so that I can prepare a little, and if it looks like we’ll have extra time I’ll invite people to give short talks / demos. I want to encourage more cross-talk between JIT users – as JIT API adoption grows we’ll need more people actively involved in JIT discussions / development, and this seems like a good forum to try to encourage that.