Re: Hydra Status

2016-11-23 23:55 GMT+01:00 Ruben Verborgh <Ruben.Verborgh@ugent.be>:

> I see that many people agree with this,
> given the popularity of Slack and Gitter;
> however, I myself have found it very hard
> to have structured discussions there,
> especially if one cannot be there full-time.

I agree that it benefits the most from people that are present, as
most means of synchronous communication.

> The problem of instant communication
> is that so much of it gets lost.
> I was never a fan of IRC for that reason.

That’s the big difference between IRC (and e-mail, for that matter)
and Slack. Because all channels preserve history, it’s no problem for
anyone to scroll back hours, days or weeks of time to read up on
something, share whatever quote they find and pick up the discussion
again.

We do this at work all the time. New employees are able to get into
things incredibly much faster than they were earlier because the
history is preserved and the communication is linear, so it’s easy to
follow. With e-mail, you usually lack the archive and the
communication is threaded, so it’s horrible to navigate.

On IRC, the communication is linear, but you can only read what has
been going on while you were logged in. IRCCloud helps with this, but
with Slack’s great search, embedding of images, formatting of text,
etc., it ends up in an over-all superior communication tool compared
to most uses of both IRC and e-mail.

I’m not saying e-mail or IRC don’t have their place, but my experience
is that Slack can (and should) replace at least 90% of it.

> I think Slack is great for day-to-day communication,
> but not for longer initiatives.

We have project related channels at work that have lasted for years.
It’s not impossible to envision something similar for Hydra, where
each “task force” or what have you create their own channel to flesh
out a design, but then have a central channel where stuff is
coordinated.

> Hence, I prefer GitHub issues, milestones,

I agree, we absolutely need to use GitHub.

> and the mailing list.

…perhaps. I don’t know. The best use of the mailing list, if everyone
could agree to use Slack for most communication, would be to make
announcements and such. For any type of discussion, I would strongly
prefer Slack.

> Hypermedia controls is everything that's also in HTML:
> forms, fields, buttons, etc.
> Concretely: hydra:Link, hydra:IriTemplate, etc.

I see.

> Description is something humans don't need:
> structure of APIs, labels, etc.
> Concretely: hydra:ApiDocumentation,
> supportedClass, possibleStatus, …

Don’t these intertwine so deeply that it’s hard to separate them from
each other? I can at imagine that the requirements of the hypermedia
controls will have profound effects on the design of the M2M
descriptions and possible also vice versa.

> The former is the domain of HAL etc.
> Most other API efforts focus exclusively on the latter.
> Hydra does both.

Yes. This, as well as it being based on JSON-LD, is what makes Hydra
so great! :)

> I would really like a clean slate for this,
> or perhaps milestones to organize the existing issues.

+1

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

Received on Thursday, 24 November 2016 09:55:24 UTC