Vulkano 2022 Organization and Planning

[Eliah-Lakhin]

Dear colleagues,

I want to thank you for your hard work in developing and evolving our project, and congratulate you on New Year! :tada: :tada: :tada:

Today there are many alternatives in Rust for graphics programming. What makes Vulkano special, and why I personally love it, is being a comfortable instrument in personal projects that inspires craftsmanship enthusiasm. And this is of course among the fact that Vulkano is a great and practically handy API with many useful features.

This spirit was laid in Vulkano foundation by Pierre Krieger, the initial developer, back in 2016. When Pierre left the project around 2018 it was maintained by Lucas Kent, and then in the middle of 2019 Austin Johnson took the role of the primary maintainer and still performing the project supervising. Among Austin's personal significant development contribution to the codebase that revived Vulkano and its infrastructure from nearly abandoned state in the beginning, we started slowly moving from a single-maintainer policy to a community-driven development. And I believe we reached significant progress by now.

Today Vulkano is fully developing by the community. It's not just small features and maintenance updates, but evolving the core architecture. The list of all implemented features and contributors of the recent one and a half years would be too long for this message, but I want especially note @Rua's contribution, who did a prodigious amount of work and made Vulkano significantly closer tied to the Vulkan design. And I also want to give thanks to Rua for her help in the user support and Pull Requests review too!

Vulkano long-term developing history driven by a friendly community makes Vulkano a robust choice. A growing number of new contributions and discussions confirm interest in the project.

The technical aspects of Vulkano are in a good state, but to move forward and help new users get involved and started with Vulkano we need to focus on other aspects too. And I will need your help, friends because my capabilities in managing Vulkano are limited. Partially because I have to focus on my personal project that uses Vulkano, and partially because of my full-time job.

1. We need to improve our website in Vulkano-www, tutorials, how-to guides, and examples. I recently merged a Pull Request in Vulkano-www with Tutorial updates waiting for review for too long. And I think we need a dedicated maintainer(or maintainers) who will work on updates regularly. At least to maintain the tutorial itself, but I think our website can be improved too in many ways. Based on the recent contribution history, I would suggest @ZakStar17 and @hakolao if it's feasible for them.
2. We need more regular maintainers. I keep an eye for all PRs during the week, but I usually can manage them once per week at best. Perhaps, for something big it's fine, but we have regular small and medium PRs that I believe can be promoted faster. If it's feasible for Rua, I would like to make her a regular Vulkano maintainer with PR merging access.
3. We need a regular moderator for our Gitter chat. Initially, I was planning to close the chat completely since there was no activity in the past, but recently the activity starts growing again.
4. We need more Vulkano highlights in media. This includes in first place Reddit posts, Rust GameDev Newsletter digest, attending on meetups(e.g. Rust Gamdev Meetup), etc. I think I can do it, but I will need to be lesser loaded with other items in this list.

I don't have any specific preferences regarding these roles. If someone wants to volunteer, I will very much appreciate it.

Aside from this, there are a few other things that I want to resolve, but I want to hear community feedback first:

1. I think we need to archive vk-sys and vulkano-examples. Both repositories confuse new users, and we don't practically maintain them. All relevant examples are in the main repository.
2. Github introduces a new feature called Discussions. I don't think it's much different from Issues, but if you like this idea and there are no objections, we can turn this feature on.

I'm finishing my long message. Thank everyone for your attention! :-) I would like to hear your feedback and ideas!

Cheers, Ilya Lakhin.

P.S. If someone has a published project using Vulkano, please let me know. This is important for us!

CCd @AustinJ235, @bwrsandman, @dpytaylo, @faulesocke, @TJYSunset, @Amjad50, @fayalalebrun, @rroohhh, @incertia, @VictorBulba, @dunkyl, @jmacnak, @funmaker, @nalane, @tuguzT, @unrelentingtech, @itzmeanjan, @maximbaz, @Perksey, @nxfs, @prataprc, @ishitatsuyuki, @kdelamo94, @i509VCB, @gurchetansingh, @Timbals, @Narsil, @CABrinegar, @IcyDefiance, @prataprc, @Arc-blroth, @dmarcuse, @dadleyy, @mvilim, @danielzgtg, @stephan-cr, @Databean, @drhaynes, @DaAitch, @EthanYidong, @gurchetansingh, @Tenebryo, @qnope, @Gosuo, @honoriocassiano, @dobrakmato, @Horki, @MoreTacos, @morr0ne, @sburton84, @Tetrel, @tmfink, @P-E-Meunier, @nifker, @colinmarc, @DiamondLovesYou, @VictorKoenders, @one-bit, @jdnewman85, @SuperSamus, @jeffw387, @jmi2k, @simdimdim, @KillianDS, @colepoirier, @kazzix14, @SamHSmith, @0xReself, @jbit (sorry if I missed someone or added by mistake)

[Rua]

I seem to be in the spotlight here, but I want to thank everyone else who has contributed to Vulkano as well. I contribute because I enjoy doing so, seeing the improvement and knowing that it helps others out is a big driving force for me. Becoming a maintainer is possible for me, but I'd like to discuss some practical things with you about that first.

I think the Discussions feature can work, but in my experience it's not something people often think about, so it could easily be missed. It might be good to point people towards it here and there, such as in the boilerplate message when creating a new issue.

Btw, it's "her" for me. :)

[hakolao]

I think it would be a good opportunity right now for me to take vulkano website updates to be a part of my routines. So I’ll gladly volunteer. I’ll try to get a first PR next week.

There are also some example ideas in my mind that could make the library more approachable. That the website would be perfect for.

One note: I wasn’t even familiar with gitter really, or perhaps I did search stuff from there some time ago, but Discord seems to be a more intuitive option. Could there be a Vulkano Discord? I’ve found it helpful with Rapier physics library for example. It could also be a lower treshold for questions but also showcasing people’s work.

[fayalalebrun]

I'm proud to say that at VideowindoW we're using Vulkano to enable asynchronous video stream compositing for our software.

We currently have a position open for a Rust Graphics Developer. If you would like a full-time job developing a graphics application in Rust, while making public contributions to Vulkano as part of enabling your work, send me an email at [email protected]

[Eliah-Lakhin]

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Based on the feedback and the prior discussion with members and Vulkano-rs admins I made the following updates.

1. @Rua was assigned a Write access role to the Vulkano repository. I provided her with instructions on maintenance process by email. From now on she will be able to review and merge Pull Requests, and maintain Github Issues too.
2. @hakolao and @ZakStar17 were assigned Write access roles in the Vulkano-www repository, and they will help us with the website maintenance. Zakhar already made several important fixes in the Website Tutorial to make it up to date with the recent Vulkano release, and Okko has created great examples with Vulkano inside and outside of our organization that demonstrate a number of complex features in action. I left the instructions on the Website repository maintenance process in this message.
3. vk-sys and vulkano-examples repositories have been archived. They are still publicly available for reading, but I left a notice in Readmes regarding their status.

Please welcome our new maintainers!

@fayalalebrun I'm glad to see that Vulkano has an example of commercial applications too! I added VideowindoW to the list of Vulkano Projects, that have a priority for us in terms of maintenance and collaboration.

Could there be a Vulkano Discord?

@hakolao Yes, I think it's a good idea! Discord has definitely better collaboration features than Gitter and Github Discussion. And a wide audience. Do you want to take a lead in setting up the server? For the icon you can use Vulkano's icon.

[AustinJ235]

@Eliah-Lakhin I went ahead and made the Discord server. https://discord.gg/bncB9W2VDV

Not the most experienced creator in discord but I think I got it setup fairly well.

[hakolao]

Amazing @AustinJ235. And thanks @Eliah-Lakhin. Just joined the Discord.

[Rua]

I think this can be closed now.