Planning: Oct 13 "plugin UX mob session"

[aaronsteers]

Opening this discussion to help plan for a mob session where we'll go through the top 30 plugins on the Hub and see what UX improvements we can make.

Scheduled time: Thurs Oct 13, 1pm Central / 11am Pacific

Improvements can include but are not limited to:

• Declaring settings when missing.
• Improving settings docs.
• Fixing the declared 'capabilities' if incorrect.
• Reviewing onboarding docs for completeness, adding prereqs docs settings or other preamble documentation if needed.
• Testing installation and the ability to create a connection (when and if we have access to the source).
• Submitting issues to the repo maintainers.
• Proposing a new default variant if the current default is not working as expected.
• etc.

If we all work together on this, I think we can make a huge improvement to the Meltano user experience, especially for new users who will otherwise have a hard time debugging these types of issues on their own.

[kgpayne]

From Eng All-Hands:

• Adding settings_group_validation where applicable.

[tayloramurphy]

We also can add:

• settings_preamble
• prereq
• next_steps

which render on the page in different spots. https://github.com/meltano/hub/blob/main/_data/meltano/utilities/superset/apache.yml is a good example of what these are used for!

[pnadolny13]

Re: Ken's point on a checklist for what to look for when evaluating a tap.

We might want to consider taking this time to create PRs to push descriptions and defaults (probably others) up to the tap or target when its SDK based and has the --about feature. Right now we usually have more content in the hub definition than in the tap itself. If we eventually create an automated process to update the hub definitions using --about for content when available, we will be overwriting more rich descriptions in the hub with less rich descriptions from the tap repo/code.

Same with defaults, sometimes we have a default set in meltano definitions that dont match the defaults in the tap. This might be a good time to push those up to the tap so the meltano definition isnt setting defaults.

[tayloramurphy]

Dashboard at the bottom (thanks Pat) where we can sort by most used.