Radar 49

[gratipay-bot]

← Radar 48

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Docs

http://inside.gratipay.com/howto/sweep-the-radar

Scope

This radar covers everything in the Gratipay organization that is not covered by another radar.

Roadmap

Short Term

Embarrassments:

• not using immutable ids (use id as primary key instead of username gratipay.com#835)
• widgets are broken (Widgets for Gratipay 2.0)
• escrow imprecision (Radar 31 #389 (comment))
• no payroll! bring back take-what-you-want gratipay.com#3433 (Payroll)
• Team and ~user pages are the same Differentiate participants and projects gratipay.com#3852

Long Term

Color code:

• red—external forces that we're under
• yellow—administration
• green—product development
• orange—marketing
• blue—capitalization

[mattbk]

!m @gratipay-bot

[chadwhitacre]

I tried going through our ticket backlog the other night to make sense of it, and I just got overwhelmed and gave up. As I inspect my soul and ask, what is the one thing I should be most focused on right now? I think the answer is still: getting back to payroll (#466).

The reason I think getting back to payroll is the most important thing for me to work on is that, without it, we don't have sufficient economic incentive for Gratipay to grow in other ways. I'm impressed and encouraged that @mattbk @rohitpaulk @aandis and others have stuck around and been able to contribute as much as they have as consistently as they have for as long as they have. Since the Gratipocalypse we have stabilized:

But in order to grow, we need to close the payroll loop, so that we can have more people spending more time working on Gratipay. If we had payroll, @rohitpaulk and @aandis could maybe start spending a little more time on development work. If we had payroll, @kaguillera and @tlevine could maybe justify spending a little more time on accounting. @mattbk could spend a little more time cleaning up old tickets and hacking on widgets. Etc., etc., etc. We're all already finding some time even without payroll, of course. That's great! Once we bring back payroll I think we will start to see our efforts snowball.

Payroll enables everything else we want to accomplish. Payroll is the bottleneck. We already have a trickle of revenue. If we had payroll, then we could use our trickle of revenue to fund more product development, sales, marketing, backoffice work, etc. That will result in more revenue.

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... but then I go back to #519 (comment), and I don't think I can drop anything from that list.

TeamX and marketing are ongoing things. They'll never stop. They're maintenance tasks that I see otherwise falling through the cracks right now, and we need to keep them going at a trickle even if we're mostly focused on bigger projects.

Accounting, Aspen, and governance all have milestones that I'm pushing towards (our first audit, Aspen 1.0, and a new operating agreement). Those are all still projects I want to get done this year. Aspen because it's our biggest tech idiosyncrasy, so it'll help with dev recruiting and onboarding if we can clean it up and document it (also, I love it and its 10th birthday is later this year :). Accounting because it's just embarrassing and dangerous not to have a proper system in place. Governance because it's important for the future of Gratipay and also plays into the way we handle payroll.

That leaves the vault and payroll. The vault starts with getting on top of our security queue, which is mostly a lot of grunt work, but then moves quickly into implementing a full-featured program, such as defined by Uphold (gratipay/gratipay.com#3870 (comment)) and/or PCI DSS (#214). Once we have a vault, we can implement identity verification and bring back payroll.

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Gosh that's a lot of work. I don't feel like I'm saying anything I haven't said before. I do see Uphold's pushback as validating our vault → identity → payroll roadmap. The crucial question right now is: do we already have a vault? Are we ready to start storing identity?

[chadwhitacre]

Which I suppose is all to say that I'm still thinking about and working on those things. :-)

[mattbk]

L1 Support 0.

[mattbk]

So, you're saying Security->Vault->Payroll?

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk Actually in my mind it's more like: Vault (includes Security) → Identity Verification → Payroll.

[mattbk]

Note to self, what gets stored in the vault?

ETA: Answer: gratipay/gratipay.com#3504 (comment)

[chadwhitacre]

Note to self, what gets stored in the vault?

@mattbk Picked up at gratipay/gratipay.com#3504 (comment).

[chadwhitacre]

Payday 0, Inbox 4, GitHub 1, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 3.

[chadwhitacre]

It's March! Time for another blog post (I think it's good to aim for one a month to avoid the blog going stale). I'm drafting one called "Making it Right."

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Draft finished, ready for review: "Making it Right." I'll probably publish this this afternoon if I don't hear any objections. This post is a lot less controversial than the last one. ;-)

[chadwhitacre]

I'd love for https://gratipay.news/ (#475) to land first.

[mattbk]

GitHub continues converging with Slack: https://github.com/blog/2119-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk This is more an answer to GitLab, I think. Voting was one of the top requests on isaacs/github, and was also mentioned in Dear GitHub. GitLab (cf. dear-github/dear-github#56) has had this feature for a bit now.

P.S. https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/708301424585809920 ;-)

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk GitLab has also had issue templates, which is the first item on Dear GitHub, and which GitHub deployed a few weeks ago.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk You're right though, their implementation of reactions is definitely Slack-derived. :)

[chadwhitacre]

New blog post is out!

https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/making-it-right-f8e1eccb46e

[chadwhitacre]

Hah! Love how Medium crops the picture. :-)

/me tweaks the description ...

[chadwhitacre]

https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/708652078122475520

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 4, GitHub 0, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 0.

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)