I agree this is an important topic.
One of the things I’ve been working on since joining the team is creating or updating our documentation to reflect our best development processes. There’s a technical side to this, of course, but the non-technical aspects are much harder to communicate.
A small example: at Google, there’s a culture of pinging unresponsive reviewers after a few days. It’s how we roll! However, this is not documented anywhere, and new external contributors might not feel comfortable repeatedly asking for reviews. Review latency can be frustrating and reduce development velocity. We are specifically working on this issue within V8’s coding culture. There’s definitely room for improvement, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well.
It makes me happy to see we’re receiving an increasing number of patches from external contributors, including Igalia, Groupon, and individual contributors like Peter Wong, Kevin Gibbons, Anna Henningsen, Choongwoo Han, Taketoshi Aono, Ben Coe, and others.