Dev Review: April 2024

Hey all,

Got another short installment of Dev Review for y'all today. Apologies about there being no dev review for March, but I didn't really have anything much to say, so I decided that making a post would have not really been worth it. Regardless, the end of April has arrived, and this time I want to discuss something important: deadlines.

For those of you who have been following Modrunner's progress over the last couple of years, you're probably fairly familiar with how I make release date estimates and push updates out. That is, the estimates I do provide tend to be fairly nondescript, such as "next month" or "sometime soon". And when I do eventually release updates, they tend to drop at random, and oftentimes nowhere close to the original estimate that I provided. So, in the interest of honesty and accuracy, I'm going to be changing the way that I structure updates for Modrunner. Going forward, I will not be providing estimates for completion of work at all. It's become abundantly clear to me (and almost certainly you) that I simply can't meet these kinds of deadlines reliably. Between the inherent unpredictable timeline of software development, and my own personal work commitments, I have a lot less time to work on Modrunner than I used to a few years ago. Because of this, and that the fact that I still want to remain as transparent and honest about my work as possible, I'm going to be switching to a workflow where instead of providing wishy-washy deadlines and still failing to meet them, I will be releasing updates "when they are ready". This means I will be continuing to work on Modrunner on my own pace, and hopefully I can continue to improve the experience for all, at my own manageable pace. I will still be providing some estimated dates for releases, but these will be more when I absolutely know for certain I can make that day work (for example, all the actual work is completed and I just need a few free hours to deploy and monitor the changes).

A couple of other changes to note: the roadmap on GitHub will no longer be accessible. I've switched that to simply be an internal tool that I use to keep track of completed work (which is basically how I used it before). I still want to be able to keep y'all in the loop however, so I've added a "Roadmap" section to the docs, which lists all the things that I'm currently working on, as well as planned features. View the roadmap here.

Once again, I appreciate everyone's support, and the next update will come out...when it's ready!

-beansquared