What the code quality day is (according to a recent mailing entry), a full day dedicated to making the Blender code more readable and thereby easier to understand.
This may not sound like much on the surface, but it might actually play an important role in the effort to attract more volunteer developers who will stick around (as we’ve already seen with devtalk and the stronger effort on patch review). More volunteers mean a greater likelyhood of user requests making it into master and longtime issues being fixed.
The first one will be this Friday, it is considered an experiment for now, but it’s good to see them willing to try new things to ensure the development quality keeps getting higher.
I am wondering if this is related at all to the Unreal grant, because of the stated purpose.
“Having Epic Games on board is a major milestone for Blender,” said Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to the grant we will make a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality. As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.”
The second code quality day has concluded and by the looks of things, the number of commits devoted to cleaning the code and making it easier to understand is way up compared to last month.
Campbell and Bastien at least spent the whole day not doing anything else, with a few other core devs. contributing as well.