advisory board minutes (January 2023)

minutes/_posts/2023-01-16-january-16-2023.md

@@ -0,0 +1,258 @@
+---
+layout: contact
+---
+
+# Minutes of the 27th meeting of the Scala Center, Q4 2022
+
+Minutes are [archived](https://scala.epfl.ch/records.html) on the
+Scala Center website.
+
+## Summary
+
+The following agenda was distributed to attendees:
+[agenda](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/master/agendas/027-2022-q4.md).
+
+Center activities for the past quarter focused on in-person events
+(conferences, summits, sprees, meetups, and workshops), online events,
+preparing the Center's 5-year report, fundraising, Metals and its
+debugger, sbt plugin publishing, Scala 3 language improvements, the
+Scala 3 compiler, the Scala Improvement Process, the Scala Toolkit,
+Scala.js, TASTy-Query, TASTy-MiMa, the Scala websites, the EPFL
+Extension School partnership, Advent of Code, Scala 3 Compiler
+Academy, Scastie, Bloop, Coursier, and process automation for Center
+activities.
+
+Details are below and in the Center's activity report:
+
+* [report](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2022-Q4-activity-report.html)
+
+No new proposals were received this quarter.
+
+Other business discussed included community representatives,
+coordination around tooling, the 2022 Scala Survey, and company
+overviews for Lunatech and VirtusLab.
+
+## Date, Time and Location
+
+The meeting took place virtually on Monday, January 16, 2023 at
+12:00pm (UTC).
+
+Minutes were taken by Seth Tisue (secretary).
+
+## Attendees
+
+Officers:
+
+* Chris Kipp (chairperson)
+  * also board member, representing Lunatech
+* Darja Jovanovic (executive director), EPFL
+* Julien Richard-Foy (technical director), EPFL
+* Martin Odersky (technical advisor), EPFL
+* Seth Tisue (secretary), Lightbend
+
+Board members:
+
+* Diego Alonso, 47 Degrees
+* Michel Davit, Spotify (filling in for Claire McGinty)
+* Graham Griffiths, Goldman Sachs
+* Krzysztof Romanowski, VirtusLab
+* Lukas Rytz, Lightbend
+* Daniela Sfregola, Morgan Stanley
+* Eugene Yokota, community representative
+
+Affiliate members:
+
+* Piyush Rana, Knoldus
+
+Piyush Rana introduced himself. He's representing Knoldus, an
+affiliate member of the Center.  Knoldus is a company of about 400
+people, with about 100 Scala developers.  Piyush based in Toronto,
+leading the company's Scala division there.  Knoldus was recently
+acquired by NashTech.
+
+## Management report
+
+This section was presented by Darja.
+
+Twitter and Databricks are leaving the Center's advisory board.
+
+Eugene Yokota, previously the Twitter representative, is now a
+community representative on the board.
+
+Darja highlighted the Center's continuing return to involvement with
+in-person events, under the improved COVID-19 situation. In Q4, Center
+staff participated in the Scala.IO conference in Paris and meetups in
+Warsaw and Lausanne. The Center is organizing a Scala Tooling Summit
+in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.
+
+The Center also led or co-led online events such as ScalaCon and the
+Scala Advent of Code.
+
+Darja and Adam Goodman gave a keynote, "Towards a Healthy and
+Resilient Scala Community", at ScalaCon. It is available [on
+video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svWnwU5PXxE).
+
+At the time of the meeting, the Center's five-year report wasn't quite
+ready, but a few weeks later it went online
+[here](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/first-five-years/).
+
+Internal training in moderation is still in progress and it is still
+planned to offer a version of this training externally.
+
+Staffing changes: Chris Kipp has joined the Center for a stint of at
+least three months, thanks to the sponsorship of Lunatech. Guillaume
+Martres has joined the Center as a staff engineer. He is already well
+known to the community for his years of work on the Scala 3 compiler
+as part of Martin's lab (LAMP).
+
+Financial report: The Center's funding for the year of 2022 came 44.2%
+from 2022 memberships, 20.4% from 2021 memberships, 25.8% from MOOCs,
+7.8% from EPFL, and 2.0% from donations.  Expenses were 91.2%
+salaries, 6.3% governance, and 1.4% travel and events, and 1.1%
+extension school expenses.  The Center has a small negative balance
+entering 2023, due to MOOC revenues which are delayed in arriving.
+
+The Center's key work areas for 2023 are:
+
+* Technical and educational infrastructure
+* Governance infrastructure
+* Involving stakeholders
+* Leveraging community contributors
+
+## Technical report
+
+This section was presented by Julien.  He presented highlights of the
+Center's technical activities for the whole year of 2022, not just Q4,
+and also showed an annual roadmap for the whole year of 2023.
+Here are the slides:
+
+* [2022/2023 slides](./january-16-2023-annual-roadmap.pdf)
+
+The slides are a condensed summary of the following blog post that
+Julien published a few weeks after the meeting:
+
+* [2022/2023 blog post](https://scala-lang.org/blog/2023/01/31/scala-center-2023-roadmap.html)
+
+For shorter-term review and shorter-term goals, please consult the
+Center's quarterly activity report:
+
+* [report](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2022-Q4-activity-report.html)
+
+And the Center's 2023 Q1 roadmap:
+
+* [roadmap](https://scala.epfl.ch/records/2023-Q1-roadmap.html)
+
+These documents are not summarized here in the minutes.
+
+A board member suggested consolidating documentation under fewer
+domains.  Currently learning materials are spread across multiple
+domains: scala-lang.org, docs.scala-lang.org, the Metals site, the
+Scala-CLI site, etc. The splits reflect the different histories of
+different tools and the different groups that produce them, but such
+splits can be confusing to newcomers.
+
+There was some discussion about ongoing support for both Scala 2
+and Scala 3.
+
+## Proposals
+
+No new proposals were received this quarter.
+
+## Scala 2 report
+
+This was presented by Lukas.
+
+At the time of the last board meeting, Scala 2.13.10 had just come
+out. This release has proved stable, so Lightbend doesn't see a need
+to rush 2.13.11 or 2.12.18 releases. They are expected to follow
+in Q2, in accordance with the usual release cadence.
+
+After the meeting, the following Discourse threads for discussion and
+updates on release timing were opened:
+
+* [Scala 2.13.11](https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/scala-2-13-11-release-planning/6088)
+* [Scala 2.12.18](https://contributors.scala-lang.org/t/scala-2-12-18-release-planning/6089)
+
+The Lightbend team continues to work on keeping Scala 2 and 3 aligned
+where possible, for example via the `-Xsource:3` compiler option.  The
+team also works on supporting migration from 2.12 to 2.13.
+
+In December Lukas submitted
+[SIP-51](https://github.com/scala/improvement-proposals/pull/54),
+"Drop Forwards Binary Compatibility of the Scala 2.13 Standard
+Library", which proposes making it possible to make additions to the
+Scala 2 standard library by relaxing the forward compatibility
+restraint we've long had. An immediate motivation would be to allow
+tweaks like adding optimized implementations of certain collections
+methods, but larger changes could also be considered.
+
+## Other business
+
+### Community representatives
+
+Chris gave an update on the process of finding community
+representatives for the board, after Rob and Bill stepped down. He
+said a committee gathered a list of candidates but many of them
+couldn't accept, for various reasons. But Eugene accepted, and the
+community was notified by this [blog
+post](https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/01/10/new-ab-community-rep.html).
+
+Eugene made remarks in favor of continued support and attention for
+Scala 2, and for ongoing attention to applying Scala to particular
+application areas and not just as a general-purpose language. He
+observes that people and companies often come to Scala out of interest
+in a particular frameworks or usage scenario, rather than interest in
+the language per se. He also mentioned that improved support for JDK
+11 and 17 in tooling could use attention.
+
+### Tooling
+
+As mentioned in Darja's report, the Center is organizing an in-person
+Scala Tooling Summit in Lausanne, to be held near the end of Q1 2023.
+
+Chris mentioned that the summit plan grew out of a series of online
+meetings that the Center has organized recently between Center and
+VirtusLab engineers, the JetBrains Scala plugin team, and other groups
+and individuals working on Scala tooling. He didn't have concrete
+results to share yet but said that he expected the summit to result
+in materials that would be shared with the community.
+
+### 2022 Scala survey
+
+The results of the 2022 Scala developer survey were published in a
+[December blog
+post](https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/12/14/scala-developer-survey-results-2022.html).
+
+Several board members found it concerning that not many developers
+with only a year or two of Scala experience responded to the
+survey. Does that reflect selection bias in survey respondents, or is
+it evidence that we aren't doing enough to bringing new developers
+into the community?  Someone pointed out that the survey data doesn't
+clearly indicate how people _came_ to Scala; what were they doing
+before?
+
+But what concrete action could or should the Center take? Perhaps the
+publicity and resources the Center provides could put more emphasis on
+the specific use cases, frameworks, and stacks that actually exist in
+industry.
+
+The Scala 3 usage numbers in the survey may seem surprisingly high,
+since we know that the largest companies using Scala have yet to
+migrate.  Martin said he believes that the survey numbers reflect the
+popularity of Scala 3 at startups and smaller shops, and that it's
+normal for adoption of newer technology at large enterprises to
+lag. "There's another world out there," he stated. There was some
+discussion around these issues.
+
+### Company overviews
+
+Chris presented an overview of Scala usage at Lunatech and by its
+customers.
+
+Krzysztof presented something similar for VirtusLab; his remarks were
+based on these [slides](./january-16-2023-virtuslab.pdf).
+
+## Conclusion
+
+As was usual through 2019, we hope to hold an in-person board meeting
+later this year in conjunction with Scala Days.

records.md

@@ -34,6 +34,7 @@ in the [Projects page]({% link projects.md %}).
 
 ### Board meeting minutes
 
+- [January 16, 2023 - Twenty-Seventh SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2023/01/16/january-16-2023.html)
 - [October 12, 2022 - Twenty-Sixth SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2022/10/12/october-12-2022.html)
 - [June 28, 2022 - Twenty-Fifth SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2022/06/28/june-28-2022.html)
 - [April 8, 2022 - Twenty-Fourth SC Advisory Board Meeting](/minutes/2022/04/08/april-8-2022.html)