Hey, I've been using your service for a while..I think it's great. Sometimes it's a bit annoying that I'm notified weeks after a release, but I always assumed that was a source issue.
A lot of things are shared on a daily basis. There's a lot of open discussion on the various community channels like Discourse and Slack: the #ttfx channel on slack for example is a great one to follow to keep up with the latency changes and report wins and losses of different changes. There's a lot of random package devs testing each PR to show how the different changes are effecting their package. One that comes to mind is the Trixi.jl folks which are sharing the result of almost every update with a bunch of plots to track the latency changes. See https://julialang.org/community/ for a full list of community channels.
Things of course only show up in the HN front page when they reach a sexy conclusion, which also means that what shows up on HN is a very biased subset of the discussion which omits most subtlety and posts the biggest speedup numbers. Most of the day-to-day of course is things more 10% changes in some case, where only when compounded 100 times you finally have a story the general HN public cares to hear. This also generally means that the long discussions of caveats and edge cases is also filtered from what most of the public tends to generally read (it's just difficult to capture some things in a blog post in any concise way), so if you care for the nuance I highly recommend joining some of the Slack channels.
So a problem I've hit with this, is that if you subscribe to the RSS feed of releases, it gives you all ...tagged versions, I think? It's not just release releases; you'll get notified for alpha/beta versions and versions that are tagged but not quite yet officially released. This makes it noisy enough to reduce the value quite a lot.
We believe in releasing early and often and using feedback to direct development. (Truth be told, this is why the "powerbox" features that we like to talk about a lot aren't totally done yet: user feedback identified many other, more pressing things to improve!)
That said, my dirty secret is that I have a little app that queries HN search every five minutes and gives me a desktop notification whenever Sandstorm is mentioned. :)
We wrote https://github.com/kiwicom/crane which posts and updates a nicely formatted Slack message with the status of releases. It also posts release events to Datadog (in a version we're publishing soon) and to an API that records them in a Postgres DB we keep for analytics queries.
There is some stuff on the edge of my perception and interest that I don't want to hear about immediately.
Instead, 15 minutes at the start of the next day are ideal to get a batch update on how the development of component X or the provision of server Y is progressing is perfect.
Thanks so much for this comment. Do you have a single person tracking the state of all the canaries, or are developers responsible for their own release cycles, including tracking any canaries that might interact with their own?
Right, but that could just as easily be blog posts, rather than release announcements particularly, and reduce the appearance of constant change. I only mention it because people have wondered why so many think the language is changing a lot, when in practice it has slowed down quite a bit. Maybe part of the solution is not posting releases on HN.
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