Remove Live Coding as a product category from Editor

Kai Armstrongrequested to merge
phikai-remove-live-coding into master

Background

Live Coding was added as a planned category in October of 2018. Since that time, no progress has been made towards defining an MVC for the category and while an issue exists there is little community interaction other than some 👍.

In February of 2020, @ebrinkman, @jramsay and @phikai had a brainstorming session to try and determine some problems that Live Coding might solve (additional notes).

Subsequently with FY21 planning this topic was revisited with @markpundsack.

Proposal

This MR seeks to remove Live Coding as a category to be explicit that this is something we won't be doing or thinking about at this time.

Does this mean we won't do it?

Not at all. It's generally agreed that some version of real-time collaboration inside of various places in GitLab is important, but we don't think solving this inside of the Web IDE is the right course of action at this time.

By removing it as a category at this time we make it clearer to groups working in this area as well as users of GitLab what our true intentions are. If at some point in the future we identify a customer use case or problem that we think we can solve with some form of Live Coding, we can always bring the category back to address that concern.

Approvals

Merge requests with changes to stages and groups and significant changes to categories need to be created, approved, and/or merged by each of the below:

  • EVP of Product
  • VP of Product Strategy
  • The Product Director relevant to the stage group(s)
  • The Engineering Director relevant to the stage group(s)
  • CEO

The following people need to be on the merge request so they stay informed:

  • EVP of Engineering @edjdev
  • Senior Director of Development @clefelhocz1
  • Director of Quality @meks
  • The Product Marketing Manager relevant to the stage group(s)
Edited by Kai Armstrong

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