Promotion

What’s up?

As many people likely know, I joined the team relatively recently. June 20th, 2020, to put a date on it. Since then, I’ve had a huge effect on the team at large:

• Standardising and documenting internal processes
• Streamlining a bunch of internal teams (such as the triage team)
• Creating an application process for people to join our team (.. link ..)
• Leading the transition to a different internal system architecture (such as the move from Jenkins to TeamCity, as well as others)
• Taking leadership of the triage and moderation teams to ensure everybody is coordinated properly

This not including the amount of work i’ve done for Forge itself and surrounding projects (such as RetroGradle, McModLauncher) as well as the toolchain (such as ForgeFlower, MCPConfig, etc).

Suffice it to say, my contributions have been met with gratitude; on June 19th, 2022 (2 years minus one day after joining!) I was described by cpw as “project coordinator, as well as community manager, yes”.

Forge doesn’t follow a formal project structure, but there has always been one role higher than any other: Project Manager. The person in charge of everyone and everything, with veto power over everything.

As of now, for reasons you can find here, I have ascended to this role, and am now the Project Manager of Forge.

What now?

Under my new rule… not much will change. This is mostly a formal update, to reflect changes that have been happening internally for a while now.

In all honesty, I have had a significant say in matters for a long time, and all of the important changes to be made have been made. There is nothing that I feel needs to urgently happen.

In the coming future, I plan to put a focus on three main areas: the community itself (for events such as the Forge Jam), collaboration (with other communities) and transparency.

Additionally, since a lot of my work over the last few years has been to streamline and increase efficiency and working capacity of the team, we are looking into an experiment: releasing builds of Forge for snapshots.

For the longest time, we considered it infeasible; the processes for updating Forge were too slow, creating mappings was tedious, testing decompile reliability was arduous, and we had nobody that can dedicate the time to maintaining these builds.

Nowadays, we have automated updating tooling, we use Mojang mappings, we have increased and parallelised the decompilation process, and have a team of people dedicated to these smaller, lesser useful updates.

It’s now possible, and we’re interested in trying it, for at least one update cycle.

Let us know if this would be useful for you.

Feedback

That leads me into the final point I’d like to make; transparency and feedback.

We’re always willing to take honest, genuine and well-intentioned feedback from the community. If you have any concerns, suggestions, or just want to chat or help out, come drop by and talk to one of our team.

With that in mind, that’s all I had to say here. Just a short, semi-formal update.