feat: blog post for Project Mycorrhiza (#954)

feat: blog post for Project Mycorrhiza

RELEASE NOTES BEGIN
Blog post about Project Mycorrhiza
RELEASE NOTES END

Reviewed-by: Laura Barcziová
Reviewed-by: Freya Gustavsson <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Matej Focko
Reviewed-by: František Lachman <[email protected]>

authors.yml

@@ -50,3 +50,9 @@ amulhern:
   email: [email protected]
   url: https://github.com/mulkieran
   image_url: https://github.com/mulkieran.png
+
+venefilyn:
+  name: Freya Gustavsson
+  email: [email protected]
+  url: https://github.com/Venefilyn
+  image_url: https://github.com/Venefilyn.png

posts/project-mycorrhiza/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,192 @@
+---
+title: "Packit dashboard and Project Mycorrhiza"
+date: 2024-11-01T10:00:00
+authors:
+  - venefilyn
+  - flachman
+tags:
+  - Project Mycorrhiza
+  - dashboard
+  - ux
+  - testing-farm
+  - logs
+  - copr
+---
+
+This term has been thrown around a bit in issues here and there relating to the dashboard and
+people usually get confused, and rightfully so! Lets dive in and see what Project Mycorrhiza
+is and why we chose this name.
+
+![Photo of beech trees in a forest](./img/forest.jpg "New beech leaves, Gribskov Forest in the northern part of Sealand, Denmark.")
+Photo by [Malene Thyssen](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene) - Own work, [CC BY-SA 3.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0"), [Link](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=752225)
+
+<!--truncate-->
+
+---
+
+## TL;DR
+
+Project Mycorrhiza is a temporary name to encompass the work relating to what the next generation
+Packit dashboard could look like by seeing how developer time can be saved, minimizing
+complexity, reducing context switching, and providing results faster. Research going into this
+will likely improve Packit overall and even be useful for other related teams. 'Mycorrhiza' means
+a symbiotic network between plants and fungi to share nutrients, fats, and sugars between each other to grow.
+
+We will consolidate existing research and begin to interview more teams on what developers are
+missing the most. Our plan is for this to be done before 2024, likely by December.
+
+---
+
+## Abstract
+
+Before I explain what Project Mycorrhiza is and what it's about, lets talk about
+the Packit dashboard and why it's been getting so much love from me the past year.
+
+It's no surprise that Packit is used within a lot of different projects around
+Fedora, which includes [Convert2RHEL](https://github.com/oamg/convert2rhel) that I'm
+a developer of. But I've always felt like Packit's dashboard has missed the mark on
+being the go-to for getting an overview for the pipeline, results, or even the
+project itself.
+
+Since I like making websites better for my own benefit, I've been spending a huge amount of my own
+time the past year to gradually improve the Packit dashboard to prepare it for something
+bigger. Which is where Project Mycorrhiza comes in.
+
+## What's mycorrhiza and mycorrhizal network?
+
+:::note
+
+This is heavily simplified for the purpose of getting a quick overview. I encourage you
+to read more about [mycorrhiza on the Wikipedia article about it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza)
+and any related articles!
+
+:::
+
+You might be familiar with something called mycelium, the network of root-like structures that
+fungi form. I'm assuming most of you have seen this form on food before, such as bread
+that grew mold.
+
+The mycelia helps fungi get nutrients and get enough food to grow mushrooms!
+Some are just terrible to be around, some are interesting to look at but relatively toxic, and
+some are even edible. Those same labels I applied to the mushrooms are something plants and trees
+sort of do as well!
+
+A mycorrhizal network is a symbiosis between fungi and flowers and trees.
+You have already seen one too as the photo above is a bunch of Beech trees that
+are "[ectomyccorhizal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectomycorrhiza)"!
+What it means is that nutrients are shared between the two, the fungi spreads out mycelia in the soil
+and transfers nutrients to the tree, and the tree provides sugar and fat back to the fungi.
+
+Since my project relates to integrating more services and getting a better
+packaging ecosystem, I chose the name Project Mycorrhiza to put emphasis on the symbiosis between
+the different tools.
+
+## Project Mycorrhiza
+
+Now with the name explanation out of the way. First and foremost, this should be seen as a kind
+of idea or kind of a temporary working group to see about the future goals of Packit and
+how the Packit dashboard fits into the Fedora service ecosystem. The Mycorrhiza name itself
+will only stick around for the duration of this investigation and alignment. Once it is done
+we will likely drop or change it. 2. Kicks off integration tests through [Testing Farm](https://testing-farm.io/).
+
+### Fedora packaging ecosystem
+
+There is a lot of packages out there that ships in Fedora, be it through [Copr](https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/) repositories or
+official Fedora repositories. For products that ship downstream there is also a downstream
+release automation! But what they most have in common is a continuous integration
+workflow to ensure that they can release whenever they want. Although Packit helps with this
+tremendously, it's only an orchestrator to make the process easier and more automated.
+
+For those that already ship to Fedora, you likely use Copr to do either general releases or just
+to do development builds to test on. Packit can ensure that new commits
+
+1. Start a Copr build for the commit with a good name.
+2. Kicks off integration tests through [Testing Farm](https://testing-farm.io/).
+3. Show the results in GitHub or GitLab workflows.
+
+Packit can do a whole bunch more than just this and even go into finer granularity, making it
+a very powerful service to use when it comes to packaging. However, when it comes to
+debugging or seeing results of tests. Packit in the current state rarely does anything more than
+providing links to the results in Copr, [Koji](https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/), Testing Farm, and so on.
+
+### Next-generation dashboard
+
+This is where I see the most improvement for consolidating this information. There is so much
+we could do and I can see so many fun projects given the currently small scope of the Packit
+dashboard. But we need to focus first and foremost on what users want, and although I have
+a strong belief I know what would be good, everything mentioned here will need to be followed-up
+with user interviews and general opinions from users before long-term initiatives will be worked on.
+
+One of the first thing I noticed when I was onboarded to Packit with Convert2RHEL was the lack of
+project overview. I wanted to see how builds and tests throughout all PRs were doing on the project
+and ideally getting results without having to leave the page. Instead, I found an undeveloped
+project page, a pipeline view that showed all pipelines, individual result pages with links
+to build logs and test results.
+
+That theme grows abundant throughout the dashboard as well and indicates so much room for
+improvement.
+
+#### Incorporating services into Packit dashboard
+
+To reduce the context switching I've experienced throughout it would be great to incorporate
+information (and potentially actions) from other services such as Copr and Testing Farm.
+
+In particular, both Copr and Testing Farm provide logs to how things went. We have the potential
+here to not only include the logs, but improve the workflow through the use of the existing
+Packit pipeline.
+
+We could load logs, parse them for relevant information, follow-build logs (this is dependent on
+third parties mostly), and even see about providing notifications on the go for when the results
+are in.
+
+Copr has an API that can be utilized for this, and so does Testing Farm, which is how they
+provide results to their own Testing Farm results page.
+
+Having all of these logs in one section and in particular a unified style would be super
+beneficial to avoid having to re-parse things.
+[Log Detective](https://log-detective.com), a project to help parse logs and provide information on why builds failed, can
+Log Detective, a project to help parse logs and provide information on why builds failed, can
+also be integrated to help their project get more logs to train with (opt-in of course).
+
+#### Product overview
+
+If you manage a product and for instance use Testing Farm you know the pain of waiting for the
+results to happen. Especially so when you are waiting on test runs within several PRs/MRs.
+
+Getting a better view for the project view to display all the pipelines for the repository
+would not only help get a holistic view for how things are going, but allow you to instantly
+see and even be notified of the results.
+
+#### Filters, search, & sorting
+
+In the current Packit dashboard you can even see a what's supposed to be search field that
+allows you to search for the forge (like GitHub), git organizations, and git repositories.
+If you've tried to use this you've quickly realized this needs an exact name and is more of a
+"quick-link" to the respective view than a search.
+
+![Search-like inputs in the dashboard's project view](img/project-search.png)
+
+What is seen in most other tables throughout as well, including the project view, is that we
+don't have any filters available. The sorting is also done by most recent first, but what if
+you want to sort by PR for example? That is missing in the current implementation.
+
+Having a search to get the results quickly would also be good, which would be similar to filter
+but just a free-form field basically.
+
+## Research and interviews
+
+So what's next? There is a lot of great information out there already, such as interviews
+by the [Red Hat UXD team](https://www.uxd-hub.com/). We will be going through
+data reported for the general lacking features developers want or are frustrated with,
+as well as following-up with Packit users with a more Packit-scoped interview to
+see how on the goal our research is. Depending on this research, which we hope to be done
+beginning of 2025 in the worst-case scenario, we will start to plan out the work
+to make the Packit service and Packit dashboard be the best it could be.
+
+We will of course continue to improve everything until then, Packit dashboard will get gradual
+improvements throughout the rest of the year and Packit will continue to work on the goals they've
+announced for the quarter.
+
+## Links
+
+- [Pitch for NextGen Packit Dashboard.pdf](assets/Pitch%20for%20NextGen%20Packit%20Dashboard.pdf)