On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 1:22 AM Dan Harkins <dharkins@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I just took a quick look at the document and I missed one point that increasingly worries me working in the IETF, namely the increasing number of participants who are not interested to write any code*. > > That's a great point! One of the attractions (to me, at least) of the > IETF was > that it wasn't some guy with some slides and a story. It was someone > with an idea, > a reference implementation of the idea, and results of (partially) > deploying the > code and seeing what it did. That was very compelling. We learned things > from the > running code that actually helped improve the specification. We were doing > engineering! It's a very interesting comment, about 'not enough people writing the code'. Since I've joined the IETF I've been hearing people complaining about 'not enough operators here, where are they?' I'm a network engineer who has to deal with routers and switches running vendor's code and with endpoints running various OSes. So while I have some ideas of what improvements I need from a given protocol, I'd not be writing actual implementations, because I have no places to actually run it in the production. I'd rather collaborate with people who can write that code much faster and better than I would ever be able so I can run their code in production and provide some feedback from my operational experience. > Yes, there has been less and less a demand on running code (sadface > emoji) and > I share your worry. Not only are some participants not interested in > writing any > code, we are also coming up with work that does not require any code at all. Well, plenty of work in the Ops area is like that but I do not think it's a bad thing necessary. Are you saying we shouldn't be documenting best (and worst) practices? -- SY, Jen Linkova aka Furry
