Nomic Report II

January 18th, 2019
nomic
This second week has been a pretty slow one for the game. Pavel and I were both sick, some players have silently stopped participating, and the code is basically where it was a week ago. The biggest change is that we now have a dashboard:


jefftk.com/nomic

This shows what PRs need review by which people. Figuring this out efficiently from GitHub's interface was one of the biggest things slowing the game down. GitHub isn't designed around the idea that all repo collaborators are interested in reviewing every PR.

(You can "view source" on that page to see how it's written, and what server-side support it requires. Even though it's built around a proxy to GitHub's rate-limited API I put caching on it, so it should be robust.)

We did resolve one issue, which is that I had a bug in #37 which would have caused the game to break if we had reached three days without a commit. Todd fixed this in #58, which we got merged just in time. This also saw our first successful use of points, where in #59 I gave Todd one of my points to thank him for catching this.

The other two substantive changes merged have been #48, which adds the ability for validate.py to inspect the PR diff in making merge decisions, and the long-outstanding #33 which gives a point for authoring a PR that gets merged.

In the next week I'm hoping we can fully build out points functionality: merge #47 to switch to named bonuses and prevent merge conflicts, revive #49 to allow transferring points in a low-friction way, and maybe add something that rewards people for staying active in the game. Another option would be to change the current probabilistic win condition from a uniform sample to weighting by points.

Referenced in: Nomic Report III: Conclusion

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