Project Melody: Our mission to empower Score developers

The team behind Score has been working hard to make developers’ lives easier and provide the BEST possible user experience. In this article, we reveal our latest mission to support this, with Project Melody. I’ll cover how the initiative aims to improve developer experience for Score. And I’ll dive into the project’s three core pillars that will help deliver smooth, customizable, and consistent developer workflows. Plus, you'll find out how to get involved and contribute! Let's go.

The successful launch of Score 

At the end of 2022 Score was launched as an open-source project. And it was a massive success. (If you're new to Score, we recommend that you start by reading Score - One YAML to rule them all first.) So naturally the next step was for us to introduce the workload-centric development idea to the developer community — and see what you thought. The response has been amazing. The ideas, concepts, and goals of Score really hit home and the community is buzzing. Turns out the ability to specify a workload’s runtime requirements in a single specification file, while abstracting away concerns about the underlying tech stack, has eased many developer headaches. Especially in today’s complex cloud-native landscape. 

While we’re stoked to achieve this initial (and major!) milestone, we also know there’s still much to be done. Like making sure you understand everything about the implementation, adoption, and usage of Score. So here goes. 

Your impactful feedback 

We made a conscious decision to share Score with you, at an early stage of development. We knew it might have been a little rough around the edges, and felt a bit clunky in certain intricate scenarios. That’s why we asked for your feedback (THANK YOU), which resulted in several new releases including updates like schema validation, end-to-end tests or installation options via brew. As we continue to refine and update Score, and learn from your valued opinions, we’ve decided it’s time to pause and consider the bigger picture. This allows us to continue working, to make sure we can provide the best possible developer experience (DevEx). 

Introducing Project Melody 

Soooo enter Project Melody! A brand new initiative dedicated to achieving a smoother, more effortless, and overall more effective DevEx. Let’s dive into the three key pillars at the heart of the project:

Ease of use: While Score’s baseline mechanics and technical capabilities are in place, our mission is to add a touch of magic. The goal is to make Score highly accessible by default, sparing developers from having to tackle intricate (and painful) details. Score should "just work", without demanding extensive configuration or specialized knowledge.

Customization: Our goal is to offer a seamless DevEx by default. We also recognize the importance of customization. So as part of Project Melody we’re creating an extensible framework for Score, that allows scaleable customization to make it work with most setups.

Consistency: Our two reference implementations score-compose and score-helm act as guiding blueprints to help drive consistency when implementing, adopting, using, and extending Score. This also provides a replicable experience across the board, no matter if you choose new integrations or to extend existing ones.

Our mission is to refine Score into a powerful, user-friendly tool that meets the needs of development teams everywhere.

Join the harmony: Help shape Project Melody

We REALLY value your feedback and insights. It’s what shapes how we improve and define new initiatives within Project Melody. We’re especially keen to hear your use cases. Like how do you primarily use Score in your projects? What particular niggles do you hope to iron out with Score? We’d love to learn about your expectations and experiences. And whether you think Score deserves superhero status — or still has a long way to go. To let us know, you can:

- Complete a survey

- Send us a Slack

We can’t wait to hear from you! So please join our harmony and help make Project Melody a success! 🎵🎶

Reference

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/richard-seroter-on-shifting-down-vs-shifting-left