Project

https://github.com/hyperledger/burrow/ 

Project Health

Burrow has seen an uptick in issues on GitHub and questions on Hyperledger chat, and also the return of a prodigal contributor. The last quarter has been a bumper one for new features, see below. Burrow desperately needs to document and publicise its existing features better.

Issues

Issues on GitHub highlight the difficulty that new users have getting started with the project. Much of this comes down to a lack of documentation or stale documentation. On that latter, a cluster of new features meant to help spinning up single-machine bare metal networks made some invalidated some of the instructions in our getting started guides. In another instance two incompatible flags where used in a code snippet which made the example throw an error. None of this was very hard to fix but it's a dumb way to lose contributors and users. I have no measurement but I'm sure this hurts our 'contributor funnel'.

We can fix this by:

Neither of these are that hard but realistically we need help/more resources to get this done. I would like to make it an aim for this quarter to get Burrow to '100% tested docs coverage' - meaning we at least  talk about every main feature of Burrow even if the docs are rubbish/incomplete. And where we have example code and scripts we run them with our CI so they don't go stale.

To try and drum up support I plan to do the following:

My aim is to exclusively focus on documentation contribution - which would include writing some example code. If anyone wants to get up to speed on Burrow this would be a good way to do it. We are not looking for perfect docs at all. The markdown pre-processor testing harness might be moderately interesting for other project/in itself if you are in to that sort of thing.

Any advice/help from TSC appreciated.

Releases

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

There has been plenty of development, the vast majority from Monax employees, including:

Current Plans

As above we need to have a push on explaining Burrow and documenting.

Technical challenges include:

Maintainer Diversity

No new maintainers. We have 4 from Monax, 2 non-Monax

Contributor Diversity

We have 3 new non-Monax contributors.

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