Dear Developer Team,
Big thanks to everyone who filled out this year's developer team survey. These are the digested results as a summary, full results can be provided on office.inkscape.org
Admin note: We'll use office.inkscape.org for next year's survey exclusively. There was no difference between google and nextcloud in functionality.
26 people responded, 77% claimed to be programmers, 65% were active, 70% were new (and didn't fill out the 2024 survey).
For developer platform we have a fair split between Debian based (35%), Fedora or Arch based (35%) and macOS (23%). With Windows being 4% (1 person), so a considerable deficit in windows developer retention this year.
Testing looks little better with 60% able to test on Wayland, 50% on X11, 46% Windows and macOS. Extra 23% Android and one person on macOS intel and one on ChromeOS.
Most people who needed help are finding help in the chatroom. Only one person needed help and didn't find it.
Build instructions were found by everyone except 2 people. And only 1 person couldn't get their build to work.
Most people fixed issues they wanted to or was interesting. No one couldn't find issues to work on.
Merge requests was our biggest failure this year with a lot of problems reported ion Slow Reviewing, Reviewers asking for too many changes (usually diverging from the original work with refactoring challenges) and also a new problem, merge requests getting stuck waiting for the UX/UI team to respond. This is the first time where we've tried to put a pause on merges until they can be checked by the UX team but we're going to have some rules about how long we can wait for volunteers to become available to check the work. (and how big the requested changes can be before it should just be a rejection)
Testing was good. We're getting better at requesting people write tests. though most people didn't think testing frameworks were expressive or extensive enough yet. A direction the project is improving on this year.
The majority of people work on Inkscape as Volunteers for Public Service (54%),followed by Education and Leisure (42%), 3 people were hired to work on inkscape and 9 people said "Other" mysteriously.
What we should work on ranged from improving programmer documentation, tutorials and videos to help developers get started. To full breakdowns of all the various parts of the code. A big problem highlighted was the massive duplication of documentation on the wiki, website and code repository was highlighted by the vast majority of people.
Other things of note were timing of meetings (see Tav's poll) and and paying more people to work on inkscape.
Lots of people thanked the project for keeping everything moving and how helpful an friendly our community it. Well done everyone!
That's it for this year. Thanks to everyone for responding and I'll see you all next year.
Best Regards, Martin Owens