Hey everyone,
In an effort to reach out to the community more effectively, especially for those who donate and are unsure what they’re donating towards, Ton and I decided that a monthly “digest” of all interesting Blender development moments would be a great idea. Starting on the 1st of May, and continuing on the 1st of each month afterwards, I’ll be posting a blog post to code.blender.org outlining developments happening in Blender that are interesting to the average user, but perhaps may have flown under the radar. It will include interesting problems encountered by developers, aha! moments, ideas for future development and improvements, concerns over existing systems, and other interesting tidbits right from the brains of the guys and girls who work so hard to keep Blender on top of its game.
The main goal here is honesty and transparency. Often times there is a lot of hype (positive and negative) in the community over comments made by developers, high-profile users, and Ton himself. My personal interest in approaching Ton with this idea was to quell a lot of the discontent from the community when there are long, silent periods after feature announcements, or when comments are misconstrued or taken out of context. I think that everyone can agree that pertinent information gathered in one place is a good goal for any organization with a user base as large and varied as Blenders.
So I’m here to ask the community: What do you want to see? What kinds of things would be interesting for you as users to see touched on every month? What kinds of questions would you like asked? Remember, keep things broad.
I hope that this can be a good resource for everyone who wonders what goes on behind the scenes, without having to dig through commit logs. It could also bring to light a lot of the struggles faced by the dev team and help people see them as people rather than code bots.
Anyway, before this goes into full swing, I’d love to hear the thoughts of the community.
Cheers!