Lehnberg - funding period evaluation - Q1 2020

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This is a brief evaluation of this funding period as it draws to an end.

My own assessment

Noteworthy positive developments in this period that’s worth calling out (but I do not take sole credit for):

  • Regaining admin access to the forum, migrating it to a new domain, and negotiating a 50% discount in rates.
  • Obtaining grin.mw domain access and distributing credentials across core team
  • CVE-2020-6638
  • 4.0.0 planning
  • Security team bootstrapped
  • Core team added a new team member.

The weekly progress update thread gives a play-by-play outline of my specific contributions in detail.

What went well?

  • Everything in the scope of the funding request was carried out as intended.
  • There’s been no missed deliveries or interruptions.
  • The timeliness of the meeting notes have finally been improved to the point where I’m happy with it, usually publishing a few days following the meeting.
  • We’ve started to think not only about next hard fork, but also about Grin after the last scheduled hard fork.

What could have been improved?

  • The management of my personal grin/life balance I think deteriorated in this period, with a lot more time spent, and not enough to show as a result.
  • There’s been a lot of, in hindsight, wasted time engaging in discussions with members of the community that have been unproductive. This has negative effects on the ability to do productive work during that day and ends up being really distracting. While the work tasked by the funding request didn’t suffer as a result, I don’t think it’s beneficial for the project, or for myself.
  • I think I’ve had a misplaced need of defending a position. The point is not to attempt to silence the critics, haters gonna hate. The point is to identify what if anything in the feedback that can be used to improve, and then action it.

What have I learned?

  • Don’t be this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/ Avoid wasting time in unproductive discussions. Focus on constructive, actionable, feedback and withstand the need to challenge or correct accusations.
  • Spend more time on delivering productive improvements.

Community feedback

Feel free to raise feedback and/or suggestions in the thread below, or in private, my DMs are open.

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Very similar experience here. I’ve reflected on the time I’ve spent arguing and I’ve lost hours and there wasn’t even any good outcome out of the debates. Grin community should really embrace “time is money”.

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A fitting quote for Grin as a ‘time coin’. My hope is that the to be instated community council can take away some of that pressure by being actively involved in the discussion on the forum, so those who have the technical capabilities to produce usefull output can focus a bit more on that.
I also think it would be good to get some more actionable targets to work/discuss on for the technologically gifted, those who can program and or discuss and implement cryptography. Maybe some ‘devide and conquer’ mentatlity is also needed. For example by forming working groups which focus on fine grained discussion and implementations of a single thing, e.g. coin-join, test/template exchange workflow, … etc. Probably best to define such targets and groups in an official meeting and make it part of a ‘roadmap’ document for Grin. In general having such a roadmap with clearly defined objectives and timelines help to avoid endless discussions without clear outputs.