Minutes of the 24th meeting of the Scala Center, Q1 2022
Minutes are archived on the Scala Center website.
Summary
The following agenda was distributed to attendees: agenda.
Center activities for the past quarter focused on Scaladex, the Scala website, improving the getting-started experience, the Inclusive Language Guide, GitHub security alerts for sbt projects, TASTy-query, Scala.js, Metals, Bloop, a plan to offer 1-on-1 meetings with Scala MOOC instructors, the Unified Scala.js Ecosystem project, a plan to offer Scala instruction to refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere, Dotty project health monitoring, a forthcoming Scala Compiler Academy, planning a Scala in Science workshop, Google Summer of Code, and the governance project.
Details on all this are in the directors’ activity report:
The board welcomes new affiliate member company Knoldus Inc., based in India with offices in multiple countries, represented by Vikas Hazrati. They have been active champions of Scala since 2010.
Julien Richard-Foy is the Center’s new technical director, replacing Sébastien Doeraene (who will remain employed by the Center).
Bill Venners and Rob Norris are both now concluding their terms as community representatives, as per SCP-028. The Center will appoint new representatives before the next meeting.
The revised refactoring proposal, SCP-027 was accepted on the condition that a working group will be formed to refine it further before any work begins.
No new proposals were received this quarter.
Other business discussed included the status of old proposals, and Scala 2 news and updates.
Date, Time and Location
The meeting took place virtually on Friday, April 8, 2022 at 3:00pm (UTC).
Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).
Attendees
Officers:
- Chris Kipp (chairperson)
- also board member, representing Lunatech
- Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
- Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
- Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
- Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
Board members:
- Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
- Maureen Elsberry, 47 Degrees
- Elmer Tan, Goldman Sachs
- (filling in for Graham Griffiths)
- Claire McGinty, Spotify
- Rob Norris, community/Typelevel
- Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
- Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
- Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
- Bill Venners, community/Artima
- Eugene Yokota, Twitter
Apologies:
- Kris Mok, Databricks
Guests:
- Adam Goodman, Northwestern University
Management report
This was presented by Darja.
She called the board’s attention to the Center’s blog post about the war in Ukraine, published in March: https://scala-lang.org/blog-detail/2022/03/04/in-support-of-ukraine.html . She also said the Center will be working with a Swiss organization, Power Coders, that offers technical training and job-search assistance to refugees (from Ukraine and elsewhere). She encouraged board members to offer internships through this organization if they can.
Staff changes: Vincent Derouand (communications), Vincenzo Bazzucchi (engineer), and Meriam Lachkar (engineer) are leaving the Center. Anatolii Kmetiuk (engineer) has joined the Center full-time; Valérie Pedroni (communications) has concluded her internship but is now employed by the Center at 60% time; Léa Coupy (communications) is starting an internship.
Julien Richard-Foy is the Center’s new technical director, replacing Sébastien Doeraene. Seb remains employed by the Center as a principal engineer.
On the communications side, Darja praised the communication team’s efforts on promoting the Center’s MOOCs on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
The Center has scheduled its first public in-person event since before the pandemic, a workshop on “Contributing to Scala” in Lausanne on April 11.
The Center is working with the Extension School at EPFL to expand the Center’s education offerings to include the option for students in the Center’s courses to pay for 1-on-1 sessions with instructors, hopefully to begin in June. Companies could sponsor this for their employees; Darja asked board members to “Please put us in touch with your colleagues who can advise us about your company’s needs and appropriate pricing.”
Work on the Center’s 5-year report is ongoing.
The governance project is proceeding, with special funding from EPFL and with the assistance of Adam Goodman. “Main goals: ensure communnity trust and growth” and “building a healthier community”, within an appropriate “scope and frame of responsibilities” for the Center as an “initiator and facilitator”. A series of workshops, discussions, and drafting sessions are in progress at the Center on the subjects of governance, moderation, language change (the Scala Improvement Process), revisions to the Center’s membership regulations, and other areas.
Financial report
This was also presented by Darja.
MOOC revenue remained approximately steady this quarter.
“We are currently at full capacity and no new engineer job post will open” in the near future, she said. Expanding the communications department will facilitate developing and implementing governance.
Technical report
Julien summarized Scala Center activities since the last meeting.
His remarks were based on the Center’s quarterly activity report:
The following notes do not repeat the content of the report, but only supplement it.
The Inclusive Language Guide was publicized by this blog post, published April 5: https://scala-lang.org/blog-detail/2022/04/05/inclusive-language-guide.html
Scaladex seeks contributors from the community; a number of technical improvements have recently been made, and the issue backlog groomed, to facilitate external contribution. See this blog post, published March 8: https://scala-lang.org/blog/2022/03/08/finding-awesome-libraries.html
See also the Center’s Q2 roadmap, on the web or as a PDF.
Proposals
SCP-027: Refactoring
This proposal from Twitter, SCP-027, was discussed again, after being revised in response to feedback from the Center and the board.
One board member summarized feedback from Metals contributors. They seemed most positive about the feasibility and desirability of supporting basic rename-refactoring without requiring hand-authoring of Scalafix rules, but thought the scope might need to be reduced in other respects (for example, the UI aspects and the ability to modify project structure).
Board members also asked: will there be command-line support, or will this only work through BSP? And what will Scalafix’s role be in the implementation? Could supporting easy authoring of Scalafix rules be the implementation route, so that existing infrastructure for running Scalafix rules (including across monorepos) could be reused? And if some of that infrastructure is missing or isn’t usable enough, could it be improved?
It was suggested to form a working group to discuss further, so the chair asked board members to vote on whether the proposal should be accepted as-is, accepted but refined and clarified before work begins, or rejected. Everyone voted to accept-but-refine.
Older proposals
Chris, as chair, ran through the status of various older proposals.
Based on the feedback from the board and the Center, after the meeting Chris submitted a pull request to update the proposal statuses in the scalacenter/advisoryboard repository. That PR closes the issue he had opened in January. See those links for details.
Bill’s statement
Bill Venners has been serving as community representative on the board since 2016. He writes:
I’ve had the honor to serve as community representative on the Scala Center Advisory Board for the past six years. At the most recent board meeting, I stepped down to make room for new voices. At my final meeting I gave this parting message on compassion: statement on artima.com
Darja thanked both Bill and Rob for their volunteer service. (Bill, since 2016; Rob, since 2019.)
Other business
Scala 2
Seth announced that the team at Lightbend is beginning to prepare Scala 2.12.16 and Scala 2.13.9 releases. After the meeting, he started these threads to discuss contents and timing:
Conclusion
We should aim to hold the next meeting around the start of July.