I had a fantastic time as a release coordinator for the Cabal project, and it is with emotion that I am stepping down from this position.

How I arrived there

I had the privilege of arriving in orbit of the Cabal development team when it was in the middle of a cultural shift. Newcomers were actively welcomed and introduced to the project, encouraged to leave reviews despite not being maintainers, to acquaint themselves with the processes and codebases.

I was given trust, and the opportunity to learn. I fucked up some times, but always got back up. After all, even monkeys fall from the trees.

What I leave behind

I am proud to say that I have set-up some procedures to help with the structure of a development community that can welcome newcomers from more fronts now.

Since the establishment of the Quality Assurance programme, newcomers can start contributing to the project in meaningful ways without having to fully understand the inner workings of all the components making up cabal-install. By having a focus on user experience and how users perceive the interactions with the tool, we are better able to keep cabal-install in line with the expectations of our user base as it evolves. This also allowed us to ask for more specific help testing cabal-install for platforms that have historically been underprivileged in the Haskell ecosystem.

Being a professional engineer, I also had the chance of being able to invite a colleague, who is a QA engineer, so that she could educate us. Her initial feedback was very useful to me, as I was not feeling like re-inventing the whole practice of Quality Assurance from scratch for the purpose of Cabal.

This has also boosted the usage of Nightly releases of cabal-install, and I am glad that we are able to distribute them smoothly with the collaboration of ghcup.

The transparency of our meetings is also important. I took the habit of transcribing our fortnightly calls. Then started to optimise the time unpaid volunteers were spending together, by loosely modelling the meeting agenda against the Eisenhower decision matrix. Actively bringing people who were only briefly involved with us was also a move of which I am proud, as I believe it contributed to demystify the decision-making process.

What is next

I am bringing all this positive energy for change and collaboration to the Haddock project! Being a notorious idiot, I need to read documentation, and thus documentation needs to be written under the best conditions. This is why I am devoting time and energy improving the process of authoring for Haskell projects. This is all work that I am doing as part of my continued involvement in the Haskell Foundation’s projects. Not sitting at the Foundation’s Board does not mean I cannot bring positive change in our ecosystem.

I am not leaving the Cabal project for good, as there will be a transition period where I’m handing off my knowledge and practices. But I believe it is time for someone else to have the immense privilege of being involved in coordinating releases of cabal.

<3

I am very proud of all the people who spent time making cabal better. Thank you all, your support was essential and I could not have done half of what I did without it.