# Technical planning discussion

**URL:** <https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/technical-planning-discussion/351>\
**Category:** Didathing\
**Created:** [November 26, 2019, 8:44pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/technical-planning-discussion/351 "2019-11-26T20:44:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![decentralion](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/decentralion/32/7_2.png) [@decentralion](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/decentralion)\
**Post date:** [November 26, 2019, 8:44pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/technical-planning-discussion/351/1 "2019-11-26T20:44:06Z")

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After the [community call today](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/weekly-community-call-agenda-11-26-2019/350), @beanow and @decentralion spent an hour or two discussing SourceCred implementation work.

- Discussed having an intermediate “readable/manual” graph format that the initiatives (and artifacts, and spotlight) plugin compile down to
  - Discussed having a directory structure of manual graphs, where type information is encoded in a file header or (better yet?) a type.json or config.json file that is in the root of every manual graph directory
  - We kind of need an instance system for this to make sense

- Discussed why we have the optimized (sorted, etc) graph json format that we have
- Dandelion volunteered to champion a first-pass instance system in the coming weeks (should include the frontend, the scores file, the weights, and automatic grain distributions)
- Spent a while bikeshedding 😛 about config file formats – did a deep dive into yaml vs toml. Turns out there are a lot of people badmouthing toml, e.g. [1](https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why-not/toml/), [2](https://github.com/avakar/pytoml/issues/15#issuecomment-217739462)
- For prioritization: having the manually edited graph format would be nice (and allow people to e.g. write ad-hoc scripts for adding new contributions to the graph), however we should prioritize building a better UI for exploring the whole graph first