DDEV Advisory Group Meeting 2025-03-05

[rfay]

Previous meeting: January 8, 2025
Next meeting: May 7, 2025

Agenda

• Turn on recording, ask for a minutes-taker
• 2024 Review
• 2025 Plans
• Finances (see reports below)
• Our Docker-Sponsored Open Source sponsorship was cancelled without notice. It has now been renewed.
• Stop using Meetup for DDEV meetings. Does anybody have a solution that allows people to sign up for a calendar event and get notified with email when it changes? Without an idea on that, will probably move the calendar entry from my personal to my ddev.com account.
• Move from Zoom to Google Meet for Advisory Group meetings: Would this cause anybody pain? Now that we have free Google Workspace, we have a meet version that can do recordings (needs to be tested)

Financials and planning

Financial Summary:

• Our expenses and income have been about equal this year so far. Platform.sh took a little time to get their new support technique going, but it's going now.
• We remain doing approximately the same strategy as discussed at January meeting: Both Stas and Randy bill at $50/hour rate; Stas's cap is now $5000 instead of $4000. Randy's cap is $4000, but not to bring bank account below $6000.
• 2024 full-year financial statements are in the January 8, 2025 advisory group meeting report
  DDEV Foundation Balance Sheet 2025-03-05-15_20.pdf
  DDEV Foundation Profit and Loss 2025-03-05-15_18.pdf

Anything on anybody's mind!

Recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9K5VvWmn-U

AI-based Meeting Notes

Recap

Randy led a discussion on Ddev's project progress, financial status, and future plans, highlighting contributions from team members and the need for increased sponsorship. The meeting covered various technical aspects of Ddev, including new features, add-ons, and potential improvements, as well as challenges in organizing training sessions and accommodating different time zones. The team also discussed strategies for enhancing community support, marketing efforts, and overall project sustainability.

Next Steps

• Selwyn to open an issue regarding the config.yaml name key and how it can be removed, suggestion improvements.
• Randy to talk to the Backdrop organization about their governance strategy.
• Randy to rework the ddev.com support-ddev page to simplify and focus on financial support.
• Randy to update the Monthly Newsletter to calibrate financial updates to the actual goal.
• Randy and Stas to test Google Meet recording capabilities for future meetings.
• Randy to move meeting invitations from Meetup to a calendar entry on the ddev.com account.
• Mladen to explore and potentially write a guest blog post on ddev.com about implementing decoupled Drupal with DDEV.
• Randy to improve documentation and training on running multiple applications within Ddev projects.

AI Full Summary

Project Progress and Future Plans

Randy led a discussion about the project's progress and future plans. He highlighted Stas' significant contributions as a full maintainer and the project's financial stability, with expenses matching income. Randy also acknowledged the efforts of other contributors, including Tyler36, Guy, Hanoi, Bernardo, and Ralph. He noted the project's sustainable support system, despite occasional challenges with unusual issues. Randy also mentioned the potential for future maintainers and the need for a full salary for both current maintainers. The conversation ended with Randy expressing gratitude for the team's efforts and the project's overall success.

Improving DDEV Training Sessions Accessibility

Randy provided statistics on the daily use of DDEV, with 15,000 weekly users. He also discussed the challenges of organizing live training sessions, which, despite having the recordings available, did not attract many attendees due to the time constraints. Mark shared his experience of benefitting from these sessions and expressed his thoughts on the need for more sessions with varied timings to accommodate different time zones. Randy welcomed suggestions and was open to feedback on how to improve the training sessions.

Discussing Meeting Times and Sponsorship

Mark and Randy discussed the possibility of adjusting meeting times to accommodate more people, particularly those in Pacific or India time zones. Randy also highlighted the promotion of DDEV sponsorship and the creation of a JSON feed for live sponsorship information. He mentioned the launch of Stas' addons.ddev.com, which has made exploring add-ons easier. However, Randy expressed frustration with the lack of responsiveness from hosting companies and agencies using Ddev, attributing it to the current market situation. He also mentioned the organization Open Strategy Partners, which they engaged to improve their market strategy but had to end due to insufficient cash flow.

Project Financial Status and Sponsorships

Randy discussed the project's financial status, stating that they were even for the year on income and expenses, with about $8,500 in the bank. He also mentioned the loss of a significant contributor, Simon Gilli, who disappeared a year ago. Michael expressed his satisfaction with the project's technical and support aspects, but noted the need for more sponsorships. He suggested that with the right approach, they could potentially increase sponsorships and bridge the gap to their monthly support goal of $12,000. Randy confirmed that they were about $5,000 short of their goal, but he planned to verify this with The Drop Times.

Prioritizing Tasks and Community Support

Michael agreed to prioritize a task and share his findings with Randy. Randy expressed satisfaction with the progress made in the meeting and planned to review proposals and goals for 2025. He emphasized the importance of the entire community offering support and the need for formal governance. Randy also discussed the need for a more focused marketing call to action and the importance of building the capabilities of contributors. He encouraged feedback on these issues.

XHGui Integration into DDEV

Randy discussed the integration of a performance tool into DDEV, resulting in new capabilities of configuring but not necessarily running extra containers. He also mentioned the addition of top-level Node.js support, which allows any kind of web server to be run in Ddev and exposed as the primary web server. Randy also talked about the web-based add-on registry, which is now live. He proposed features such as using mDNS as an additional name resolution technique and allowing add-ons to include other add-ons. He also discussed the need to improve support for their largest sponsor platform and Upsun, and the potential for improved Github Codespaces support.

Drupal Camp Atlanta and DDEV Improvements

Randy discusses the upcoming Drupal Camp Atlanta, where he plans to host a BOF session on replacing Gitpod with Drupal Pod. He mentions several items on an agenda, including improving self-diagnosis capability in debug tests, updating ddev.com to show current funding status, and simplifying WSL 2 and Windows packaging. Randy also expresses interest in enhancing Ddev Share to include more options beyond Ngrok and suggests using Viper for the configuration system to allow for more flexibility in overrides.

DDEV Features and Tool Discussion

Randy and Selwyn discussed the features and initiatives for Ddev, a tool they use. They agreed to prioritize the features, with Selwyn suggesting that item 7 should be moved up as it's low effort. Randy also mentioned that they had applied for the Google summer of Code but were not accepted. Selwyn raised a concern about multiple copies of the same site locally causing confusion for Ddev commands. Randy suggested removing the name field from the config yaml file to solve this issue. Selwyn agreed to open an issue for this. Randy also mentioned the need to develop maintainers and be aware of risks, such as burnout and overwork. He also highlighted the need for updating blogs and screen shares, and mentioned the importance of add-ons for Ddev users.

Team's Financial Situation and Software Plans

Randy discussed the group's financial situation, noting that they had increased their spending cap to $5,000 and had a buffer of $6,000 in their bank account. He also mentioned the cancellation of their Docker-Sponsored Open Source but reassured the team that the most important feature, no download limit, would continue. Randy proposed moving their Zoom subscription to Google Meet, but asked Stas to check if recordings were possible before the next meeting. Milan asked about changing PHP version or allowed PHP memory without restarting, to which Randy responded that it was possible but would require an issue or discussion in Discord. Jonas expressed his gratitude for the team's work and his desire to contribute more to Ddev.

Running Multiple Apps With DDEV

Randy discusses the possibility of running multiple applications that need to communicate with each other in DDEV. He mentions that the latest release includes a feature allowing the front-end to be on the primary domain, with the back-end on a subdomain. Randy prefers running two separate projects for clarity but acknowledges that it's also possible to run multiple applications within a single container. He encourages more training and documentation on this topic and invites guest blog posts about implementing such setups.