Welcome to the community Danny, and thanks for the feedback! With some of our planned improvements on Beam's landing page, we are hoping to address the 1st friction point you mentioned. We have received similar feedback in the past a few times.
Regarding the 3rd feedback, I am hoping we can continue the discussion on GH vs Jira issues, and some improvements will be introduced there as well. Thanks again for the write up! On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 3:27 PM Kenneth Knowles <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for writing all this up and for putting up PRs to improve things! > > Kenn > > On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 12:17 PM Danny McCormick < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> 👋 Hey folks, my name is Danny - I recently completed my first Beam >> PR[1] (a small extension to the Go Dataflow runner) and am planning on >> becoming a more regular part of the community. As such, I wanted to use my >> fresh newbie eyes and share some of what was nice and where there was >> friction about getting started. >> >> Disclaimer: this is coming from the perspective of someone who is pretty >> used to open source development, but has minimal experience with the Apache >> way, Beam, and the languages my change came in. I'm hoping my experience is >> helpful to those of you who have been around for a while and haven't seen >> things as a newcomer in a long time, but it may not be reflective of the >> experience of others. >> >> *Things that were really nice:* >> >> - The community has been really welcoming and encouraging of >> contributions, something I saw in my first code review, my first pr, and >> even the tone of the docs. Special thanks to @lostluck and @jrmccluskey for >> making my first interactions welcoming and prompt. That experience can be >> the difference between one time and repeat contributors. >> >> - Getting started writing my first pipeline, and then ramping up to more >> complex concepts was surprisingly easy - in particular, the docs, examples, >> and Katas made for a reasonably smooth process. It wasn't always clear how >> to go from that to more complex transforms and there's of course room for >> more clarity, but I appreciate the work that's gone into the getting >> started experience. >> >> - Overall, the code base is pretty easily understood/reasoned about, and >> the high quality of code made it pretty easy to make my first change. I'm >> pretty impressed at how simple/well composed this system is even as it >> approaches a tricky problem space (hopefully I'm saying the same thing >> after I make some bigger changes :)) >> >> *Friction Points:* >> >> - It was harder than expected for me to figure out what made Beam >> different/special from other tools in the space out there for users. >> Specifically, it wasn't immediately obvious why I would use Beam instead of >> just running my jobs directly on Spark or Flink or one of the other >> runners. One pretty big challenge here was that I didn't really get how >> easy it was to switch runner types/how powerful the portability (and >> unified streaming/batch) model was. I'm not sure exactly what would make >> this easier for someone new to the space, but some sort of graphic or brief >> statement of "this is where Beam adds value over most other frameworks" in >> the Readme would be cool. >> >> - There were some small paper cut usability things in the repo. >> Specifically, it looks like the labeler is broken (issue[2] and pr[3] added >> to address this) and there isn't a CONTRIBUTING.md (issue[4] and pr[5] >> added to address this), though the contribution guide is linked elsewhere. >> Both of these are probably non-issues for experienced contributors, but add >> a small amount of friction for people who are trying to get involved, >> especially those who navigate a fair amount of OSS repos, and they're >> pretty easy to fix. >> >> - I know there's some separate discussion about this in a different >> thread[6], but the use of Jira instead of GitHub issues added a layer of >> friction to getting started. Concretely, I would've put up my first pull >> request and created my first issue earlier if I didn't need to go through >> the process of creating a Jira account and getting permissions to assign >> tickets, and it was harder to find a good first issue to contribute to. I >> can imagine others might not have pushed through that. >> >> With all that said, I'm really excited to be joining the community and >> get to add to Beam, and I hope it was helpful or interesting to get a >> newbies perspective. >> >> [1] https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/16643 >> [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-13779 >> [3] https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/16665 >> [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-13780 >> [5] https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/16666 >> [6] https://lists.apache.org/thread/q5nbwxqvfkzlz664c4kchzkbj26c3r89 >> >> Thanks, >> Danny >> >
