Add 'What we learned with Clippy's feature freeze'

Author: blyxyas

content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/index.md

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+path = "inside-rust/9999/12/31/clippys-feature-warming-up"
+title = "What we learned with Clippy's feature freeze"
+authors = ["blyxyas"]
+
+[extra]
+team = "the Clippy team"
+team_url = "https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/dev-tools#team-clippy"
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+
+
+The [feature freeze affecting Clippy][feature-freeze] has reached its end date. This means that the Clippy project has been accepting pull
+requests that add new features (and new lints) for a while.
+
+The Clippy has reviewed the results, and we can say that it's been a success 🎉. It has been so great that we managed
+to create an all-time peak in the number of pull requests opened in a week.
+
+In this plot we can observe that peak (the red lines mark the start and end of the feature freeze)
+
+![Plot of PRs per week, we can see an all-time peak when the feature freeze happens](/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/prs_per_week.png)
+
+After some data crunching of those pull requests opened after June 26th, we had 18 pull requests open in that period
+that added lints. With 326 pull requests open by both and old contributors, we want to highlight all the new people
+that started contributing to Clippy, 47 new contributors who opened a total of 195 pull requests.
+
+On a team meeting, we concluded that the results of the feature freeze were positive enough to warrant a future one.
+The cadence and duration of these is still being decided.
+
+58% of all pull requests by new contributors were opened by the same person. This single contributor opened 114 pull requests of the
+total 195. We held a meeting with her ([ada4a] on Github) to iron out some of the details of
+the codebase and our procedures for new contributors. We are currently analyzing that meeting in order to improve
+the experience for future and current contributors.
+
+We also asked some questions to Ada (ada4a) to include as a mini Q&A, here are some of the answers.
+
+## Ada's Q&A
+
+> Why do you like contributing to Clippy? What's so fun about it?
+
+I came to enjoy improving the suggestions that Clippy makes: they are
+fascinating in how they point out of the exact part of code that is
+problematic, and show the (sometimes pretty complex) manipulations required to
+fix it. Also, It has been empowering to learn the machinery behind the
+compiler, and use that knowledge to refine these diagnostics even further.
+
+> Would you recommend contributing to Clippy? Why or why not?
+
+Yes, for multiple reasons:
+- Rust is (in)famously hard to learn, and to me, Clippy is one of the parts of the
+toolchain most helpful for beginners, as it teaches idiomatic style and helps
+discover helpful functions from std -- thus, contributing to it helps reduce the
+entry barrier of the language.
+- If you, like me, wanted to learn the inner workings of the compiler and contribute
+to it some day, but were intimidated by the [development setup required for that][rustc-dev-guide],
+Clippy could be a nice stepping stone, as hacking on it doesn't require compiling
+rustc, but it interacts with a lot of compiler's data structures and APIs.
+
+[rustc-dev-guide]: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-and-run.html
+[ada4a]: https://github.com/ada4a
+[feature-freeze]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/06/21/announcing-the-clippy-feature-freeze/