There’s something going on the Hypothesis project right now: There are currently three high quality pull requests open from people who aren’t me adding new functionality.
- Create profile loading mechanism
- Implement characters strategy
- Add dates() and times() strategies to hypothesis.extra.datetime
Additionally, Alexander Shorin (author of the characters strategy one) has a CouchDB backed implementation of the Hypothesis example database which I am encouraging him to try to merge into core.
When I did my big mic drop post it was very unclear whether this was going to happen. One possible outcome of feature freeze was simply that Hypothesis was going to stabilize at its current level of functionality except for when I occasionally couldn’t resist the urge to add a feature.
I’m really glad it has though. There’s a vast quantity of things I could do with Hypothesis, and particularly around data generation and integrations it’s more or less infinitely parallellisable and doesn’t require any deep knowledge of Hypothesis itself, so getting other people involved is great and I’m very grateful to everyone who has submitted work so far.
And I’d like to take this forward, so I’ve updated the documentation and generally made the situation more explicit:
Firstly, it now says in the documentation that I do not do unpaid Hypothesis feature development. I will happily take sponsorship for new features, but for the rest of it I will absolutely help you every step of the way in writing and designing the feature, but it’s up to the community to actually drive the work.
Secondly, I’ve now labelled all enhancements that I think are accessible for someone else to work on. Some of these are large-ish and people will need me (or, eventually, someone else!) to lend a hand with, but I think they all have the benefit of being relatively self-contained and approachable without requiring too deep an understanding of Hypothesis.
Will this work? Only time (and effort) will tell, but I think the current set of pull requests demonstrates that it can work, and the general level of interest I see from most people I introduce Hypothesis to seems to indicate that it’s got a pretty good fighting chance.