Proposal: Bevy Guest Lectures

[Trashtalk217]

Currently, every 3 to 4 months the news section of the website lights up: A new Bevy release! This includes a massive blogpost with everything that changed between versions.

I love this blogpost, and I don't want to change it. There are however a couple of negatives to doing it this way.

• Smaller features can get buried in the largeness of the release notes.
• Efforts that span multiple releases get split up, making it hard to get a complete picture of them.

Given that the News feed is quite empty for the months between releases I'm proposing the following:

Bevy Guest Lectures

In Bevy Guest Lectures (BGL, name subject to bikeshedding), contributors can highlight some efforts they've been working on and go into more depth. These posts can have the following benefits:

• Good PR. I've noticed that the Rust community (or at least the way I engage with it) likes blog posts and this can bring more attention to the engine.
• Informing / Education: Learning is always a good thing, but these posts could also direct users to parts of the engine they didn't even know they could use.
• Attracting contributors: By putting a spotlight on a specific effort we can direct attention and hopefully contributors to it.

Guidelines for BGLs

Everything is up for discussion, but these are some possible guidelines to keep to.

• Don't shy away from technical details, but assume a general (programming) audience. Very few people know what GPU bindings are, or archetype moves for that matter. It's fine to talk about these things, as long they are explained first.
• Don't make too many promises. The 'What's Next' section of the release notes has always been more of a suggestion than a roadmap and the anarchist development style of Bevy doesn't lend itself to strong commitments.
• There shouldn't be more than one blog post each month. This is to keep them relatively special and not spam people with them. There may be less of them (I highly doubt that this will attract so much attention that we have to maintain a backlog), but this also serves to keep the workload low on the maintainers that have to review these posts. I am assuming that @cart or @alice-i-cecile will want to have final say about what's put on the website.
• Common sense things like: don't use hurtful language / be inclusive / see also the code of conduct.

What BGLs shouldn't be.

Guest lectures shouldn't be used as documentation. If that is the case, this signifies that we're lacking in documentation.

One More Thing

I've been talking about BGLs as 'Guest' lectures, however, I've mostly been talking about internal engine developments. I think it's also nice to throw this open to third-party crate developers.

Let me all know what you think. And what sort of thing you'd like to read / write for something like this.

[rparrett]

Not at all opposed to this, but for the sake of discussion: given that there seems to be a healthy ecosystem of personal blogs ^{1 2}, virtual meetups, conference talks that already can/do get amplified by Bevy's official social media accounts, I just wonder how much more useful a section on the website would be to those authors/speakers.

There's also the existing tradition of yearly community reflection that happens on the website already, which seems to overlap a bit with this proposal.

[bushrat011899]

I do like the idea of having some focussed content mid-cycle to fill the dead air. Since some contributors already post on their own private blogs, I don't see any harm in cherry-picking some of these for re-publication on Bevy's website (obviously with the author's involvement!). News sites like Ars Technica will often syndicate articles from WIRED on weekends to make up for the reduced capacity of their own staff, so there's definitely precedent.

[cart]

Given that there seems to be a healthy ecosystem of personal blogs 1 2, virtual meetups, conference talks that already can/do get amplified by Bevy's official social media accounts, I just wonder how much more useful a section on the website would be to those authors/speakers.

This has been our current approach (intentionally). I think its important to call out that the news section of the Bevy website isn't something most people log in to check on a regular basis. In terms of "visibility" it is a pretty bad platform (thats why we don't share direct links in our Discord announcements, and instead "force" people to go through a social media link).

The "platform" that we can lend people is our followers on Bluesky / Mastodon / X. And by boosting peoples' content in a way that connects directly to their accounts and/or websites, we allow them to build up their own personal brand and following. I think this approach is better for authors and the ecosystem at large.

We've been discussing doing the same for @alice-i-cecile and I for our Bevy Birthday posts (but not yet sure where we'll land on that next year).

Thats not to say that we shouldn't have a "BGL series". But I'd personally want to do it in a way that puts eyes on each author's platform.

[bushrat011899]

Thats not to say that we shouldn't have a "BGL series". But I'd personally want to do it in a way that puts eyes on each author's platform.

Perhaps a short article that highlights the existence of the article and links back to it? A paragraph or two summarising what it's about and maybe an image where applicable.

[Trashtalk217]

I'll be very honest when I say that I don't really use social media (or at least not in a good way), so to me the website is perhaps a bigger deal than it actually is.

I'm going to respond to some of the points brought up in arbitrary order:

Perhaps a short article that highlights the existence of the article and links back to it?

I don't think there's much of a point in doing that. You'd achieve much the same by just giving a shout-out on social media. You don't need a blog post for that.

And by boosting peoples' content in a way that connects directly to their accounts and/or websites, we allow them to build up their own personal brand and following. I think this approach is better for authors and the ecosystem at large.

I am not suggesting we strip the names from the blog posts. We should give clear credit. For example, the blogs on https://godotengine.org/blog/ put their author's name front and centre. I also think that it could be an option for people who are not interested in maintaining their own personal blogs / online presence. Moreover, a blogpost could be authored by multiple people (like, let's say, a working group), where it wouldn't make sense to put it on someone's individual blog.

I'm also not suggesting we stop boosting people who write their own thing, that's great. This will just be an extra option for those that are interested.

Some examples of blogposts I'd personally like to see:

• All about Reflection: How does it work, what can you do with?
• The Road to Relations (I'll write this when we have an MVP, it's so close I can taste it)
• Editor progress report (because people have been asking incessantly)
• Maybe an introduction to meshlets that's technical, but not quite as technical as Jasmine's very thorough blogposts.
• Jondolfs experience with writing a physics engine for an ecs. (I want to point out that his writing is excellent btw, like it's really good.)

The last two authors I've pointed out already have their own online presence and I'm of course not speaking for them. If they don't want to write for the website / syndicate some of their posts, that's perfectly fine.