Thanks to an unexpected free afternoon due to a brutal spring blizzard, and large amount of caffeine, I've come up with an initial draft of a D newsletter. It's tentatively named "What's New in D", and it's purpose is to aggregate the important community news in one place, as well as to give D some well-deserved publicity.

As I said, this is an initial rough draft to show how I envision the basic format. The end product, of course, will not be hosted on Google Docs... I've been considering using GitHub Pages to host it, but if anyone has a better suggestion, please let me know. I think it would be really neat to write these newsletters in DDOC, but I know barely anything about DDOC.

The current format is somewhat similar to This Week in Rust. A little opening blurb, followed by a paragraph detailing any recent articles, followed by a couple of the big announcements, which each get a whole paragraph to themselves, followed by a list of one-line smaller announcements. Next is Community Overview, with another short introductory paragraph, and a couple of paragraphs detailing interesting discussions from the newsgroup.

After that is a list of new pull requests and commits to master. This is the section that needs the most work; right now, it's just two bulleted lists of two pulls/commits each, separated by whether they were made to DMD/Phobos/Druntime. In the finished product, these sections will contain all or most of the recent pulls/commits... which leads me to worry that it could turn into a space issue. However, if I prune the lists to include only what I think is interesting, somebody is bound to get upset (probably rightly so). On the other hand, if I just randomly pick, some of the good stuff will inevitably get passed over. I'm not sure how to handle this fairly. Thoughts?

Last is Miscellania. for Adopt a Bug Report and Adopt a Bounty, I'll choose a random bug report/bounty that people can tackle (or not). The whole point is to try to mitigate the fact that a lot of bug reports and/or bounties can go a long time without any action, and get buried under new stuff coming in. I also considered Adopt a Pull Request, to let people know about pull requests sitting around without getting a review. I also included Music for Hackers as a sort of fun little afterthought. Thoughts?

Most of my time spent writing this was trawling through the newsgroup and Github to find stuff, but I'm hoping that once this gets going, people will email me a lot of the stuff to be included in the newsletter. Dicebot has already offered to let me know about stuff he notices, and I'd really like to get the word out that I'm looking for interesting/noteworthy submissions (I set up a new email for this: Whats.New.in.D@gmail.com).

You might notice that I went out of my way to avoid any mention of a specific interval for the newsletter. That's because I'm not really sure whether it should be weekly or bi-weekly. I went in thinking that bi-weekly would be best, as to avoid those slow weeks with little newsworthy items, but I ended up having much more than I expect in just the time period from ~March 23-April 1, which suggests to me that a weekly format might be preferable.

This raises an issue, however. I'm a university student, and while I'm currently working, I'll be returning to school in the fall. I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get everything in order. The only solution I can think of is to have a couple of people who would be willing to release the issue if I'm unable to for whatever reason. I expect this to be a rare occurrence, but it must be accounted for, so if there were just a few people willing to volunteer in case of such a eventuality, I'd be grateful.

The last thing is licensing, for completeness. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but why not shore up a potential hole while it still exists? I think either Boost or GPL would be serviceable.

Obviously none of this is final, and I'm willing to change up most of it if somebody has a better idea. I'm not crazy about having multiple big lists of links (announcements, pull requests, commits), so I'd really appreciate input on that, as well as suggestions for other sections to add/replace.

You can view the rought draft here.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing

Again, please DO NOT submit this to Hackernews/Reddit, etc., as it needs a lot more work before it's ready for public consumption.

DO destroy.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
> Thanks to an unexpected free afternoon due to a brutal spring blizzard, and large amount of caffeine, I've come up with an initial draft of a D newsletter. It's tentatively named "What's New in D", and it's purpose is to aggregate the important community news in one place, as well as to give D some well-deserved publicity.
>
> As I said, this is an initial rough draft to show how I envision the basic format. The end product, of course, will not be hosted on Google Docs... I've been considering using GitHub Pages to host it, but if anyone has a better suggestion, please let me know. I think it would be really neat to write these newsletters in DDOC, but I know barely anything about DDOC.
>
> The current format is somewhat similar to This Week in Rust. A little opening blurb, followed by a paragraph detailing any recent articles, followed by a couple of the big announcements, which each get a whole paragraph to themselves, followed by a list of one-line smaller announcements. Next is Community Overview, with another short introductory paragraph, and a couple of paragraphs detailing interesting discussions from the newsgroup.
>
> After that is a list of new pull requests and commits to master. This is the section that needs the most work; right now, it's just two bulleted lists of two pulls/commits each, separated by whether they were made to DMD/Phobos/Druntime. In the finished product, these sections will contain all or most of the recent pulls/commits... which leads me to worry that it could turn into a space issue. However, if I prune the lists to include only what I think is interesting, somebody is bound to get upset (probably rightly so). On the other hand, if I just randomly pick, some of the good stuff will inevitably get passed over. I'm not sure how to handle this fairly. Thoughts?
>
> Last is Miscellania. for Adopt a Bug Report and Adopt a Bounty, I'll choose a random bug report/bounty that people can tackle (or not). The whole point is to try to mitigate the fact that a lot of bug reports and/or bounties can go a long time without any action, and get buried under new stuff coming in. I also considered Adopt a Pull Request, to let people know about pull requests sitting around without getting a review. I also included Music for Hackers as a sort of fun little afterthought. Thoughts?
>
> Most of my time spent writing this was trawling through the newsgroup and Github to find stuff, but I'm hoping that once this gets going, people will email me a lot of the stuff to be included in the newsletter. Dicebot has already offered to let me know about stuff he notices, and I'd really like to get the word out that I'm looking for interesting/noteworthy submissions (I set up a new email for this: Whats.New.in.D@gmail.com).
>
> You might notice that I went out of my way to avoid any mention of a specific interval for the newsletter. That's because I'm not really sure whether it should be weekly or bi-weekly. I went in thinking that bi-weekly would be best, as to avoid those slow weeks with little newsworthy items, but I ended up having much more than I expect in just the time period from ~March 23-April 1, which suggests to me that a weekly format might be preferable.
>
> This raises an issue, however. I'm a university student, and while I'm currently working, I'll be returning to school in the fall. I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get everything in order. The only solution I can think of is to have a couple of people who would be willing to release the issue if I'm unable to for whatever reason. I expect this to be a rare occurrence, but it must be accounted for, so if there were just a few people willing to volunteer in case of such a eventuality, I'd be grateful.
>
> The last thing is licensing, for completeness. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but why not shore up a potential hole while it still exists? I think either Boost or GPL would be serviceable.
>
> Obviously none of this is final, and I'm willing to change up most of it if somebody has a better idea. I'm not crazy about having multiple big lists of links (announcements, pull requests, commits), so I'd really appreciate input on that, as well as suggestions for other sections to add/replace.
>
> You can view the rought draft here.
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Again, please DO NOT submit this to Hackernews/Reddit, etc., as it needs a lot more work before it's ready for public consumption.
>
> DO destroy.

Looks good.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fjk2ti/a_community_newsletter_for_d

Vote up, everyone!

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:28:31 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> Looks good.
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fjk2ti/a_community_newsletter_for_d
>
> Vote up, everyone!

Please remove this, as I explicitly asked it not to be posted yet.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:30:02 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:28:31 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
>> Looks good.
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fjk2ti/a_community_newsletter_for_d
>>
>> Vote up, everyone!
>
> Please remove this, as I explicitly asked it not to be posted yet.

Seemed like an appropriate day to make this joke :). No removal needed (it's not a real link).

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:33:48 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:30:02 UTC, Meta wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:28:31 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
>>> Looks good.
>>>
>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2fjk2ti/a_community_newsletter_for_d
>>>
>>> Vote up, everyone!
>>
>> Please remove this, as I explicitly asked it not to be posted yet.
>
> Seemed like an appropriate day to make this joke :). No removal needed (it's not a real link).

Ha, I forgot it was April Fool's today. You nearly gave me a heart attack.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
>

The link requires access to be granted to view (it lets you request access). Perhaps this was intentional but I thought you should know.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:35:55 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
>>
>
> The link requires access to be granted to view (it lets you request access). Perhaps this was intentional but I thought you should know.

Yes, I revoked access as soon as I saw the Reddit link =) It's back now.

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:

This is really great!

>
> Most of my time spent writing this was trawling through the newsgroup and Github to find stuff, but I'm hoping that once this gets going, people will email me a lot of the stuff to be included in the newsletter. Dicebot has already offered to let me know about stuff he notices, and I'd really like to get the word out that I'm looking for interesting/noteworthy submissions (I set up a new email for this: Whats.New.in.D@gmail.com).

I think the email will work well, but it might also be nice to have a public document that contributors could edit directly.  It might save you some cutting/pasting/word-smithing time.  Maybe then all you would need to do is perform a final edit.  Wiki or Github, mabye? (or maybe not)

>
> You might notice that I went out of my way to avoid any mention of a specific interval for the newsletter. That's because I'm not really sure whether it should be weekly or bi-weekly. I went in thinking that bi-weekly would be best, as to avoid those slow weeks with little newsworthy items, but I ended up having much more than I expect in just the time period from ~March 23-April 1, which suggests to me that a weekly format might be preferable.

If you (us?) can keep it up every week, that would be nice.  But if it starts with weekly, beware the commitment and readers' expectations.

>
> This raises an issue, however. I'm a university student, and while I'm currently working, I'll be returning to school in the fall. I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get everything in order. The only solution I can think of is to have a couple of people who would be willing to release the issue if I'm unable to for whatever reason. I expect this to be a rare occurrence, but it must be accounted for, so if there were just a few people willing to volunteer in case of such a eventuality, I'd be grateful.

Having to do the same thing every week can get old, too.  Again, I think some way for the general D public to contribute directly would help with this, but I know that has the potential to become a management nightmare in itself.


> Obviously none of this is final, and I'm willing to change up most of it if somebody has a better idea. I'm not crazy about having multiple big lists of links (announcements, pull requests, commits), so I'd really appreciate input on that, as well as suggestions for other sections to add/replace.
>

I hate to suggest things I can't do myself, but a stats section might be nice.  For example:
x bugs opened
x bugs closed
x pull requests submitted
x pull requests merged
x pull requests closed
x pull request waiting for Walter/Andrei ;-)
etc...

I've seen some talent here in this community make some really fantastic tools, and maybe this is something someone could throw together easily and just execute once a week.

What are your plans for publication and distribution?

And where will they be stored so one could reminisce in nostalgia?

Thanks for this!
Mike

Meta:

> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing

Looks quite nice. But I suggest to avoid this wizbang style of writing, and use one more fit for a technical newsletter:

>It’s been an amazing couple of weeks for D. From some great discussion on the newsgroup to a batch of exciting new pull requests, the tireless machine that is the D community motors ever onward.<


> I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get everything in order.

To reduce the probability of such delays, and to make you less bored of this work in the following years, I suggest to make your work (to create a post) as fast as possible and as much automatic as possible. This means creating scripts for the automatic upload, etc.

Bye,
bearophile

It's really quite awesome. Thank you!

Nit: Needs a prominent date display.