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report-august-2015.rst

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.. post:: Sep 9, 2015
   :tags: report
   :author: Anthony

Report - August 2015

August was a busy month for us. Write the Docs Europe was at the end of the month, and our focus has been on getting readthedocs.com into a public beta state. We're nearing the end of the 3 month period that we budgeted for as part of our fundraiser and have a few more tasks to push out.

Goals

First, an update of the goals we set for this month:

Improve Github/Bitbucket integration
We fixed a very common bug caused by the way implemented syncing to the Github API. There are still some user experience issues we would like to address.
Better Sphinx experience for authoring
We started to refactor parts of our build backend and discussed what the optimal tool for authors would be. We don't have a clear sense of where to split up our build backend code and what is extraneous to authors yet, however.
More code cleanup
Linting cleanup progressed, and we are on to discussing stricter linting efforts.
More features to user gold subscription
We have added the ability to "bless" projects with a gold subscription, but are still working on the user experience behind reminding users to donate via gold subscriptions, nor are we explaining gold to users yet.

Update Details

Build backend refactor

The builder backend code was refactored and now all build commands executed are tracked and associated with builds. This surfaced a number of hidden commands and a few failure conditions that were being disregarded.

This also removes the confusing magic PDF build that gets triggered from a normal build object.

Build output page
With the build refactor tracking all commands separately, we can now show output of all the commands executed. Before this output was split into output and error output streams, and it wasn't always easy to distinguish failures. The build output page will now also live update through the API as changes become available.
Improved Github Syncing
Our initial attempt at Github integration updated from the Github API in-process, which could result in a timeout when the API didn't return quick enough. Syncing against the API was moved to our task queue, with an API to monitor changes to the task.
Started work on more automated build toolchain
We have plans to make the process for building Sphinx documentation more automated for authors. We started laying out plans for what that tool would look like and how it would function.

For more information on our development orchestration, visit or subscribe to our public Trello board.

Issues

In the month of August:

Feel free to raise any questions you have about any of these changes on our issue tracker, or on our Freenode IRC channel, #readthedocs.

Goals for Next Month

Improve gold subscriptions more
With the fundraiser funds nearly allocated, we need to begin budgeting for the next few months, and will need to start bringing in income. We want to improve the user experience around donating, as well as present more reminders to donate to active users.
Increase income for the community site
With better user experience around donating, we hope to launch another effort to get more users and companies to donate.
Improve import user experience
There are still some gritty parts to the import process that should be streamlined. Some of the major Github bugs have been squashed, but a larger UX improvement is still required.