Introducing RFCs for Extensions: Make Your Voice Heard
Late last year we committed to publishing and updating a public roadmap for our developer platform and now we’ll be adding on to that effort with an RFC (Request for Comments) process for our major roadmap items. We truly believe that the best products are made hand in hand with customers and RFCs are how we’re going to do that.
RFCs are a way to gather feedback from our developer community about our proposed technical strategies for potential updates — before we dive head first into implementation. The community will be given the opportunity to read and comment on everything related to upcoming projects ranging from our motivation for choosing the project at all to specifics of the API we’re designing.
How it Works
Before we start development on a feature, we will post a new topic on the developer forums in the RFC category. These are open for anyone to read and comment on and we encourage you to voice any and all thoughts or concerns you have in the RFC. We will leave these open for a minimum two weeks with the goal of reading and addressing all feedback before closing an RFC. When an RFC is closed, we will post a final revised version that incorporates any final changes due to feedback to serve as the plan of record.
We’ve taken inspiration from a number of open source communities including Ember and Rust for our initial RFC strategy and our RFCs will start by including, at a minimum, the following information about the proposal:
A summary of the proposal
Motivation for making the change
Detailed design (including wireframes or mocks when applicable)
Rollout/upgrade path considerations
Drawbacks of the proposed strategy
Alternatives we thought of but opted to not do
At this time, RFCs will be posted only for Extensions features, but we may expand this in the future. Within Extensions, however, we will post an RFC for any non-trivial change to any API or developer workflow.
We Want Your Feedback
We’re kicking off this process for a feature we hope to work on early this year: Dynamic Anchors. Take a look and leave us some feedback.
Early in 2018, we will post our plans for how to tackle Multiple Video Extensions, Mobile Extensions, and more. Make sure to watch the RFCs space on the forums for new posts.
Lastly, we’d love to hear your feedback on the overall process (yes, this is a request for feedback on how we request feedback). Drop us some comments on the forums with any thoughts you have. It’s important to us that you are represented in our development process so there’s anything we can be doing better we’d love to hear about it.