Guidelines for Collaboration

Visibility Into Work and Productivity

  • Daily Standup The stand-up channel on the Waku Discord server is where core contributors share their daily stand up summarizing their daily planned tasks.
  • Weekly Report: Every Friday, all team members must add a comment to the Epic GH issue they own and worked on the past week or planned to work on next week. See Waku project management for more.
  • Track your work with Github issues: Make sure to always have an open Github issue corresponding to your current task. Follow the following post for some insights on how to write good Github issues.
  • Quality Github pull requests: Github issues are (typically) followed by one or multiple Github pull requests (PR) to address the task(s) set out in the issue. PRs should be of reasonable size and with proper documentation. All commits within the PR should be signed. Do not forget to request PR review from your peers when your PR is ready. Before merging an open PR, all commits should be rebased on master and squashed into a single commit with a semantic commit message. Use the following guides on how to make a good PR
  • PR Reviews: Spend a portion (10-20%) of your daily work reviewing other team members’ Pull requests. This will allow a swift and smooth development process.
  • Seek feedback Do not hesitate to seek feedback from the senior members of the team, especially those who work closely with you.
  • Communicate effectively: Know the team members that are relevant to your project and get their feedback and comments on your project when need be.

Communication media

  • Basic principle: Waku is an open-source protocols and software. We are part of a wider community. As such, your first instinct should be to communicate as openly as possible in the forum/channel most suited to your query. That said, we have channels for team-internal communications that relate to project management, team travel or other more personal conversations.
  • Discord server: it takes a while to get used to the bewildering number of channels on the Waku Discord server. Here are some guidelines to help you get started:
    • #intros: a good place to introduce yourself to the community once you’ve joined
    • #gm: a quick “good morning” when you start your day adds to a friendly environment and shows other community members that you’re online
    • #stand-up: daily one-liners indicating what your focus will be for the day
    • #support: general support questions related to Waku protocols or the organisation
    • #nwaku-contribute, #go-waku-contribute, #js-waku-contribute: discussions related to the nim, go and JavaScript Waku v2 clients respectively
    • #team-pm-private: team-internal discussions related to Waku Product project management.
    • We maintain various team-internal channels, including #afk, #watercooler, #events, and more, which facilitate sharing while we work
  • Examples:
    • You’re getting started and have a question related to the nwaku codebase: ask away in the open #nwaku-contribute channel. Feel free to tag specific people that you think may help, but don’t be too surprised if other community members jump in with an answer.
    • While reading a Waku RFC you have a suggestion on how to improve the protocol: ping the team on the open #support channel for general question about protocols, or #rfc if it is about phrasing or clarity in the RFC. You could also create a GH issue in the vacp2p/rfc repository.
    • You want to inform the team that you’re off sick: use the team-internal #afk channel.

Autonomy and Motivation

  • Alignment with principles: Waku follows a set of principles as described in https://status.im/about/, a good understanding of those is vital to making a meaningful contribution to the team. Should you have any questions regarding the principles, do not hesitate to reach out to your team members for more insights and explanations.
  • Familiarize yourself with relevant tools and tech Your work involves knowledge of the basics of Git and Github e.g., creating issues, pull requests (PRs), branches, merging, rebasing, etc. Spend some time and familiarize yourself with these concepts.