8. Communication with the OTP Team maintainers

8.1. Message channels with the OTP Team maintainers

OTP Team assigns a pull request (PR) to a team member as a maintainer. Close and frequent communication with the maintainer is a key for contributing good and high quality code. Many levels of communication may happen, as in the following list:

  • GitHub issues (on the PR), for open and public exchange of ideas, soliciting broader participation from the community;
  • Direct email exchange, mainly for the unofficial exchange of conceptual ideas and making private communication and decision; and
  • Other informal channels such as face-to-face meeting in a conference, which is rare but important to find out the gut feelings of each other on various issues.

8.2. Respect OTP Team working hours

Most of OTP Team maintainers seem to work in the Sweden time zone, which is the same as Central European Time Zone as observed in many other nations and regions in Europe.

In the Central European Time Zone, CET, the standard time in the Winter is UTC + 1 hour. Central European Summer Time (CEST), which is observed during the summer, is UTC + 2 hours. Note well that the Summer Time or Daylight Saving Time period differ between Europe and US/Canada.

When you send and receive message to OTP Team, you need to respect their regular working hours. For many of the volunteer contributors including myself, writing Erlang/OTP code is often for fun, but for the OTP Team it is their duty and business. They rarely work in weekends and holidays [1]. Sending messages will be OK even on their vacation, but don’t expect a prompt reply during non-working hours. And remember OTP Team members have to handle a lot of different OTP modules and applications, so their time slot for each application is limited.

Footnotes

[1]Everyone needs rest to recuperate.