"Since 2011, Drupal core has had a scheduled monthly bugfix release window, and since 2012, this window has specifically been on the first Wednesday of the month. We are considering extending this window so that a bugfix release is scheduled to come out during a specific week, but not necessarily on Wednesday or any particular day."
"The TWG coding standards committee is announcing two coding standards changes for final discussion. These appear to have reached a point close enough to consensus for final completion. The new process for proposing and ratifying changes is documented on the coding standards project page."
"The Composer-managed vendor directory has been removed from the Drupal core git repository for the 8.1.x and 8.2.x branches. (This change was previously committed, but rolled back due to rate limits on Github affecting composer installation. Those limits have since been lifted, so we have recommitted the change.)" This is great news for Drupal and another step in the modernization of our processes.