Q: Slack or IRC for fabio?

[killcity]

Any chance we can have a Slack or IRC channel? Seems like there is some rapid development going on. I also just dropped Fabio into prod for two hours and have seen some very impressive numbers.

Cheers

[magiconair]

Below I'll provide my reasoning for not doing this at this point but I'm interested to hear whether there is a pressing need for a different communication form.

Live chat

There is a gitter channel which I've abandoned and I've used Slack with one user but would have to opt for a paid option to make it open I guess. Maybe there was a free tier for open-source projects but TBH I didn't dig very deep.

The main concern I have with live chat (or a mailing list) at this point is that it splits the conversation into multiple parts which then have to be merged again. Everybody will have to look in multiple places and needs to make a decision on whether to start a new conversation on the chat, the mailing list or github. Rules have to be made, maintained and people reminded.

Live chat also interrupts the work flow. People may not want to respond at a given time or it may be inconvenient because of timezone. This can be frustrating since the expectation is that live chat is "live".

As imperfect as github is for this it centralizes the discussion in one place so everybody knows where to look and it eliminates this can of worms for now. It is searchable, people get notified if they want to and can opt out of certain discussions which is difficult in a global live chat. I'll try to respond as quick as possible and others can do the same. Depending on how active the community becomes this may not be sustainable, though. I'm open for suggestions.

If you want to discuss things that shouldn't be public then we can find something that works. LinkedIn, Skype or Google Talk are fine with me. We can do that on a case-by-case basis.

Feel free to just ask what you'd like to know here.

Rapid development

I've come back from vacation and am catching up on issues. There is no real roadmap or plan. Critical bugs and simple questions always get addressed first. After that it is what has the highest demand (assuming I have an idea on how to implement it) and/or what I'm interested in myself. Please let me know what bugs you and how you would like to use fabio but cannot right now. In general, I like to mull over solutions for a bit until I've got a good idea.

Contributions are always welcome. Please start with a discussion instead of code or a PR unless it is a trivial change.

Your numbers

I am very curious to hear about them. If you want I can include you - and everybody else who wants to as well - on the front README. Just drop me a note or send a PR.

Thanks for your comments and the issues you've opened so far.