Defer Community:
Feature RFCs and OSS documentation

Our users' feedback has always fuelled the rapid evolution of the Defer Platform, from the Function Insights, Build Diagnostics, or documentation wholes.

However, as of today, all those feedback was sent through different mediums (Crisp chat, Discord, emails, Slack) without a way for our users to get involved in the future of Defer.

For this reason, we start “Building in the open” by kicking off Feature RFCs and open-sourcing our documentation.

Feature RFCs

Our Discord community, strong of 140+ members, has been a primary source of feedback from the #feedback channel to other channels.

However, we realized there are better places to collaborate on feature requests and debate technical specs than Discord.

A good example is the Throttling feature, a discussion initiated by Mark and Ben, from the community, on Discord:

As we already started to work internally on this topic, creating an RFC on GitHub discussions was the logical next step to start a technical spec review with the community: https://github.com/orgs/defer-run/discussions/71.

How do Feature RFCs work?

Anyone can create a Feature RFC (why not you) with the following required information:

• A straightforward name (ex: “Throttling RFC”, “Defer Console live logs”)
• A technical spec

The technical spec should contain the motivation, code examples, and use cases with various design proposals:

Once published, the RFC will be sent to broadcast to our customers and the community for review.

RFC lifecycle

Each RFC will go through the following lifecycle:

An RFC discussion is transformed into an issue that describes the release schedule, as a feature is often split into multiple releases and phases (opt-in alpha, beta, etc).

What if no consensus is found?

Sadly, a product cannot satisfy all requirements without becoming a configuration monster.

However, we'll do our best to explain a final decision.

What do you think our Throttling feature should look like? We want your opinion: https://github.com/orgs/defer-run/discussions/71.

Open-source documentation

The Defer documentation is finally open-source, welcoming feedback and contributions:

https://github.com/defer-run/documentation.

All documentation pages feature 2 links to submit feedback or propose changes from GitHub:

Please note that the documentation will soon be completely revamped with a new design, content, and content structure; stay tuned!

Looking ahead

We cannot stress how valuable the contributions of our users have been since the beginning.

We are excited to facilitate your contributions to Defer's future and will expand the “Building in the open” soon with new initiatives!