The First Crate Polishing Workshop

27 February 2017

On Friday, the 24th of February, we held the first Crate Polishing Workshop in Darmstadt, Germany at Cowo21 (German site), who thankfully hosted the event free of charge. Thanks!

Let’s first recap what makes up a crate polishing workshop:

Select a crate. We drew by lot, but one can also pre-select a crate, which allows for better preparation

(If the crate maintainer is absent) fork the crate. All work will be done on the fork

set up teams of at least two people to work on CI, README, tests,examples, docs. We could also clippy-clean and rustfmt the crate.

hack, hack, hack…

(afterwards) merge the PRs and send a combined PR to the maintainer if needed

What went well:

We all had a good time. Some of us even learned something new

Working in teams meant everyone had someone to talk to

Splitting the tasks kept the whole thing manageable.

Pairing experienced Rustaceans with newbies meant no one got stuck

What could have worked better:

There was a lull in the beginning while we searched for the snip of paper containing the WiFI password. Being there earlier and writing down the password on more paper snips would have avoided that

Drawing the crate by lot meant we had essentially no preparation. Selecting a crate before would have allowed us to better prepare; though it is not clear if this really posed a problem

While merging stuff, there was a lot of waiting on CI. Doing a manual N-way-merge would have alleviated this

Three hours was quite short for such a workshop. Having more time would have allowed us to dig deeper into the actual code; as it was, our coverage was somewhat superficial

The final verdict:

This was fun, and I can recommend it as a learning experience for other meetups. I’ve not yet reviewed the changes and prepared the final PR, so I’ll update this post once it is done; but I wanted to write this up here as long as the memory is fresh.