With the goal of prioritizing community-requested features, we just launched a UX-focused developer survey which will guide the evolution of Motoko’s IDE support, base library, package ecosystem, and documentation.
The survey should take about 5-10 minutes, and all questions are optional. Your responses will factor into our short-term (1 year) priorities for the language, so this would be a perfect opportunity to cast a vote for anything that could make a big difference to your development workflow.
Here’s the survey:
If you have any additional suggestions for the Motoko language or ecosystem, please feel free to drop a comment on this forum topic.
Great to see this survey, I just answered but forgot something: it would be nice to be able to disable specific warnings in the Motoko extension.
Specifically, there is a warning when using Array.append (which makes sense considering it’s low efficiency) but sometimes you have no other choice than using it and when the codebase starts to grow you end up with tens of the same warning.
I’m aware that you can set “hide-warnings” flags in dfx.json, but I would like to be able to do the same for the Motoko extension and only for specific warnings, I hope it’s possible
Not many people will appreciate this work, but from someone who does this for their current internship, I just want to say you did a fantastic job. I hope once you finish the quality assessment you make the data points available. For some reason, that tickles my fancy.
Thanks! I’m learning a lot about generative UX research by doing this (primarily a software engineer), so I appreciate the appreciation, haha.
As soon as we get enough responses, I am looking forward to sharing the survey results with everyone. We’ve already had quite a few important surprises from the data and expect to learn even more over the next few days.
Well, coming from a completely different industry my responses may not exactly be what you were looking for. However, I did provide thoughtful feedback from an active new user trying to creep their way into developing, coding/ programming.
My interests might more align with the grant awardee information (that is what I do for my university right now). So, while I lack the technical skill (currently), I do genuinely appreciate the work and often underappreciated power these quality assessments can often have.
Obviously, what happens after the data is collected is going to be important, but I feel everyone always overlooks those soliciting the feedback to gain the data in the first place. It’s honestly so cool to take the survey responses and turn them into data that really, determine where things go moving forward.
On a systems level, these things are where I want more people to spend their time on, and less time arguing over semantics here and there. We need more data, more surveys, and more constructive forms of feedback from the community in a form like this (quality assessment), and then we can gauge not only how to handle Motoko, Grant awards, the community, and culture.
Sorry to rant! I hope my feedback in the survey was of any (some) use!
100% agreed! It’s been amazing to have the opportunity to start doing this here at DFINITY. Thank you so much for filling out the survey (as well as your support for these quality assessments in general).
I should also mention that your specific background (coming from a different industry and gradually learning how to code) represents the vast majority of people we want to help onboard into the Motoko ecosystem. This makes your feedback about as useful as possible for the purposes of this survey.
Based on a previous conversation with @domwoe, it sounds like there’s a possibility of sending this out to the developer grant awardees. If this ends up happening, I’ll make sure to post whatever I can from the aggregated results so you can dig into the details (along with anyone else who’s interested).
I am really looking forward to seeing the results. They might surprise me. I hope my feedback helps!
I also am going to be looking forward to seeing grant awardee results! I may have more useful input on that area, than this. So, please keep us (the community) involved/ up to date!
Based on the results so far, we received the most requests for (1) improving beginner-oriented documentation, (2) developing a new, contributor-friendly Motoko VS Code language server, and (3) redesigning Vessel to make package management as simple and convenient as possible.
We are reading through every single text-field response, so 100% of everyone’s thoughtful feedback is being used to guide our development priorities.
The survey is now being distributed to previous Developer Grant recipients! We look forward to sharing these results in the coming weeks.
Made my day again. I’m definitely surprised that your most frequent request was similar to mine. I’m truly looking forward to the results.
Now, are you the one handling all the Developer Grant surveys as well? I’d love to start a DM and ask a few questions for comparison on these types of grants, compared to the ones I am learning/ am used to.
