Laundry list of feature requests for electronic music production

Feature Requests
16

Hi again folks,

@d0lfyn - unfortunately I don’t have any easy answers. More programming experience is always helpful of course. I know that since Sonic Pi is a (mostly) volunteer driven project, you might not have the time to immediately learn all the technology that might be useful for Sonic Pi development - but at the very least, if it’s helpful, the languages that we have been using are C++ for the GUI, and Ruby and Erlang for the server components. (With the goal to most likely phase out the Ruby server components). There is an existing overview of the Sonic Pi internals on the Sonic Pi wiki, (though it is in sore need of an update, as I intend to do in the near future) See here:

@siimphh: these days the bulk of the discussion around development has been between the core team. There used to be a Sonic Pi room on Gitter (a web based instant messaging platform roughly similar to slack) but this eventually became difficult for us to use. So, other than forum topics here, comments on issues on the GitHub issue tracker, and the occasional comment or question on Twitter, there has not been a standard channel for communication around development with the community.

I understand and agree with your desire as a potential contributor to stay on the same general development path as the core team :+1: it is the same with us as individuals within the team :joy:
The challenge is that the development of Sonic Pi is largely informal and unstructured, so there is not much of a defined roadmap or process. Here are some thoughts I have had personally about facilitating community contributions in several (tiny) ways:

  • open up a publicly visible feature wishlist
  • create a public forum discussion topic specifically for discussing said wishlist (either here or on the GitHub discussion forum on the Sonic Pi GitHub page)
  • update the contributor/developer centric documentation in the Sonic Pi repo (and likely transfer a bunch of it to the GitHub wiki with the thought of making that more central and active for contributor/developer documentation - this includes things like links to the wishlist, READMEs for how to contribute, updated overviews of the Sonic Pi architecture, and anything else that may provide more useful information for community contribution)
  • where feasible, perhaps try to share work in progress on new features or major updates so that people can get an idea of the development choices that we are making.

I’d particularly love folks (core team, community contributor or otherwise) to provide feedback about my above ideas, and suggest any others you might have - it’s definitely not a simple matter to facilitate community contributions to a project like this (even more so in a manner that is easily manageable by Sam and a small team of volunteers) so anything we can do would be good.

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