Ecosystem-wide FRAME Project Manager

Ecosystem
1

Currently, a large number of pallets used throughout the ecosystem are maintained under Parity’s Substrate repo, and for the most part, managed by Parity developers. Admittedly, the number of full-time FRAME developers in Parity is less than most people think, and all are extremely busy with certain niches (weights, XCM, etc). This leaves some of the more management aspects of FRAME to be unappreciated.

Some of the problems that I see, or additional works that I would love to see around FRAME are:

  • Triaging all FRAME related issues and bug-reports, tagging the right experts.
  • Help create better release/change-logs for pallet crates.
  • Help enforce unified, high quality create-level documentation for all pallets.
  • Host ecosystem-wide FRAME calls for FRAME developers from different teams to collaborate and exchange ideas (read: “monthly ALL FRAME devs call” in your calendar)
  • Receive reports of security audits from different audit teams within the ecosystem, and make sure the important ones are resolved and communicated well (cc @VinceCorsica).
  • Overlook the merge rules of FRAME pallets, such that non-parity members can also approve PRs and push fixes forward. @xlc wrote a good summary of some issues related to this last year here.
  • Look into ORML, and other pallets developed throughout the ecosystem, and ensure standards are being communicated, and misalignments are prevented.
  • A bit more long term, this person can also realize the vision of creating a unified repository for all the common pallets used in the ecosystem, and discussed first time in Cambridge during the first parachain summit.
  • Write a “this month in FRAME”, a traditions that is being done by both Ink! and Staking. This should include the progress in FRAME the framework, Parity’s FRAME pallets and others like ORML.

All of these are things that in an ideal world I would love to do myself, but I find it near-impossible to find time for all of them while pushing forth with development.

2 years ago, I would have pursuit fixing this by trying to convince Parity to hire a project manager for FRAME. Given the development of the ecosystem over the last year, and some of the feedback that I have heard, I am instead bringing this here, calling out for the ecosystem to put forth and/or agree upon a candidate to do this task, and have this person also be funded directly by the treasury, not Parity. With this person being outside of Parity, I hope that we can achieve a higher degree of uniformity across pallet repositories such as Substrate and ORML etc.

I strongly think that this role cannot be fulfilled well by an expert PM not familiar with FRAME, Substrate and Polkadot. An ideal persona for this role is a (semi-)retired FRAME developer who has all the foundational knowledge, and is no longer keen on full-time coding, but rather working across the ecosystem.

11 Likes
4

I definitely agree a dedicated PM for FRAME will be super helpful. I have tons of feature requests and I do believe many of them are relatively high priority but still a few of them are parked for many months and only prioritized when someone got a bad bite. We also have a lot of work silently lost tractions mid-way during development and become stalls. We also have teams requesting features and everyone agrees it is a useful thing and no one is owning the task. Most of those issues could be addressed with a good PM helping to manage work and chasing people.

While I won’t have time to do this myself, I am happy to support this role as much as I can.

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5

I agree having someone dedicated to it would help.

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6

at Mangata, we’re developing on the level of FRAME (we modified frame_system and frame_executive and some core modifications outside of FRAME).

We’d be happy to be added into the loop and contribute to PM

cc @alice_und_bob

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7

I want to bring this up again and call out to anyone who think they are, or they know someone who might be suitable for this role, to put themselves forth here.

8

I would propose @shawntabrizi :wink: I think he would be the best person for this job, but I don’t know if he wants it :smiley:

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10

Since this is a non-coding role, would there be a place for this person on the technical fellowship since their main task will not be contributing PRs?

11

I think everything mentioned above will be achievable once someone is a seasoned developer, and then takes a step back to do such meta tasks, rather than direct contribution. It can still go hand in hand with part time active development.

Even without this though, one of the goals of the fellowship is to retain and propagate knowledge of the core protocol, including FRAME, and I think the above activities all contribute it to some extent, although this is merely my interpretation.

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