Day 17 - Tidy your open PRs/issues

Let’s go extra meta today.

Please spend 20 minutes tidying up your PRs/issues/tickets/whatever.

If something is irrelevant, close or delete it.

If it something is old but might still be relevant, see if you can move it toward completion (or deletion). Try this: “This issue is quite old. I’m going to delete this early next week unless someone objects. That okay with you @whoever?”

If something is new and relevant, but not actionable, see if you can add or track down the information required to make it actionable.

I recommend working from oldest to newest.

As always, remember that the point isn’t to clean up all the things, it’s to spend 20 minutes chipping away at them.

Enjoy!

This was a quick one for me. We usually keep our PRs clean and we just went through a big cleanup of our tasks and issues.

Yeah, 9 tickets closed :muscle:. 4 were between 10 - 12 months old. Others have been duplicates, already fixed in other bundles or were too vague.

Lovely morning task while drinking some :coffee:️.

ps.: @ben didn’t receive an email for this task. Wondered what I were missing this morning until it made click “Oh no! No CQC mail today…” gonna check the website. CQC became already a habit :grin:.
pps.: mail came in later than usual (11am instead of 5:30am)

No PRs for me, but I closed some issues, which were done are no longer relevant.
Even archieved some slack channels for old projects.

Spent a few hours on triaging issues from ActiveAdmin yesterday. So many of the oldest issues are feature discussions (multiple years old).

Any guidance on closing them out? It’s easier to leave them open because many of the features are huge endeavors.

What’s your approach to large, open source project’s issues? There are other maintainers and a community of users to consider.

Doh.

I’m experimenting with a campaign to send these out in a localized-to-timezone fashion, but it doesn’t seem to be able to guess people’s local time effectively.

Thanks for letting me know.

No PRs for this project. Our issues are pretty up to date. I went through them and turned one of them into a sub-task of another issue.

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One of our projects has over 400 open GitHub Issues, some as old as four years :(. We seem to hoard a bit.

Awful and shameful self-plug: I used this MVP of a side project I made to go through and close Issues on this repo.

The idea of the side project is “Tinder for GitHub issues.” It forces you to choose to keep or close an Issue (starting with the oldest) and doesn’t let you pass.

Warning: it will comment on the Issue whether you decide to close it or keep it. The original intention was to warn co-workers either way about your decision. In this case, I’m a bit nervous to see what they say when I come into work tomorrow, and they have nearly 20 emails from me closing issues.

If anyone does use it and has feedback, please motivate me to work on it by requesting me to fix all of the shortcomings (e.g., not so great markdown display).

Glad I got the excuse to actually use something I wrote a year ago for its original intention.

:+1:

We recently adopted a FIFO policy of sort for PR reviews, oldest submitted should be reviewed first. It’s helping making the process smooth, and preventing PRs from getting stale.

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Closed one outdated issue, everything else was quite relevant.

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Not yet a public project, right now pr and so on, are only form coworkers and all are solved. So, this goes for free.