Hi folks, I wanted to post an update on my work and what I'm thinking of working on next. Hopefully this gives the community an opportunity to check my work and comment on my plans for the next month. My main priority is to support the other OpenRefine contributors, so please don't hesitate to reach out if you see something unaddressed that you'd like to see improved.
April was largely focused on maintenance of the codebase. I was more active in issue and pull request triage, I released a new version of OpenRefine, and I kept researching the internals of OpenRefine. With each issue and pull request opened, I'm able to learn more about how OpenRefine works, which leads to these reviews taking less time and my reviews will hopefully be more helpful. On the technical side, I wanted to explore Proxy all (or most) reconciliation API calls through the backend · Issue #7185 · OpenRefine/OpenRefine · GitHub as a means of learning more about OpenRefine's architecture. However, this led to me spending much more time learning about Butterfly (the web framework OpenRefine uses) than reconciliation, as Butterfly seems more in need of knowledge sharing than other parts of the application architecture.
Looking ahead to May, I'd like my research of Butterfly to be useful, so I'm planning to write up some documentation on the framework. I'm also working towards the release of version 3.10, hopefully having a beta out towards the end of this week or early next week. Additionally, I'd like to spend time making a plan to stabilize the APIs for OpenRefine, both internally for extensions and externally for REST API clients.
While general feedback is always welcome, I'd especially like to hear about the following:
- What do you find confusing about Butterfly? What kind of materials would be most useful for you (Javadocs, tutorials, etc)?
- What do you find most frustrating about extending OpenRefine, either through the REST API or through an extension? I know there is a request for more guides on building extensions and the REST API is generally described as "use at your own risk", but anything specific would be very helpful.
- I held office hours every Thursday in April, though attendance was generally low. I would like to hold office hours again in May but would appreciate any feedback about when and how people would prefer to engage.
I hope this information is useful! Please feel free to comment on the format of this update itself. I'd like to be more transparent and accountable to the community and I hope updates such as these help with that effort.