Refs: #84506

Hi everyone — you may or may not have already heard that I have recently joined the VS Code team. Since joining, I've been working on bringing more of the outside voice into many aspects of the project — including extension development and the extension authors community. In that spirit, below is a proposal for how we can improve our interactions and support of the extension authors community. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

-- Eric

The extension ecosystem is incredibly important for users of VS Code and for VS Code itself. As such, anything we can do to help extension authors be happier and more productive improves the quality of this ecosystem. With that in mind, we’d like to create a tighter feedback loop and create a community for extension authors where they feel welcome and free to ask questions, voice problems, and provide feedback on evolving and upcoming extension APIs.

Goals

Let’s build a better, more collaborative extension ecosystem together. We believe that closing the feedback loop with extension authors will help us better understand their needs and help them to build better extensions, more effectively. Giving extension authors a channel to feel heard and appreciated will also help nurture that valued community. Beyond just extension creation, the management and tracking of extensions is also an important area to improve. We also need to make sure that people interested in building extensions have what they need to get started and feel welcome.

Open communication for the challenges of extension authors

Today, extension authors use GitHub to open issues regarding APIs and issue they run into, but we don’t hear much from the extension author community about what features are missing for them in the marketplace. We also believe that some discomfort is never reported because authors may feel it's not important enough to open an issue or that an issue isn't the right mechanism for being heard.

Get early feedback for on proposed APIs

As the team introduces proposals for new extension APIs, tracking issues and samples are created. While recent changes to the API proposal process, should make it easier for extension authors (and the wider community) to follow along and provide feedback, we believe a richer, high-fidelity channel for collaboration will improve things even further. By providing a direct feedback channel between the engineer working on a specific feature or features and the most-likely consumers of them, we can get better, more collaborative feedback, faster.

Monthly Meetings

Each month, @eamodio and @fiveisprime will lead an extension authors meeting. This meeting will happen toward the end of the iteration. At the start of an iteration, an issue will be created and posted containing when and how to join the call, the topic(s), and an agenda (as outlined below), as well as who should attend, if the topic is targeting a specific community for feedback (e.g. the scientific computing community). Ideally, we'd like to limit the audience to 6-8 people to facilitate richer, more effective communication. Also, as with the iteration plan issues, the previous meeting’s issue will be closed once the next one is posted.

While the agenda is very likely to change, the current working plan is below.

• [10 min] Follow-up on any open issues from the previous meeting
• [~20 min] Introduce topic and related new features and proposed APIs, if applicable
• [~30 min] Open discussion

Topics will likely be chosen based around the work in-flight on the current iteration plan, but we may also open topics up to some voting to provide a platform for extension authors to present and learn from one another.

Finally, at the end of the meeting, highlights will be posted to the meeting issue and any action items will get individual issues created and linked to the meeting issue.

There may also be a second, more ad-hock meeting with extension authors that is less structured for getting to know the authors and listening to their feedback.

Feedback

This plan is a draft of how we are thinking of moving things forward, but we are very open to feedback as to what the community thinks and needs. So please chime in and leave your thoughts and feedback.

Thank you!

Open questions

• What’s the best time to have this to include as many time zones as possible? Rotating time from month to month?

• How best do we limit the audience (6-8 people) for each meeting? As a smaller audience facilitates richer, more effective communication.

• Should the calls be recorded for public consumption? Would that have too much of a negative impact on candid conversations?