Guide setting out where to start if updating or creating own plugins?

[judge]

The people working on code seem to be doing it "very silently".

Or doing it when they can?

 

[birdman]

Or doing it when they can?

I'm sure that's the case.
But there have been release updates roughly every other day since I got the box several weeks ago, so someone (or, I suspect, some people), somewhere is doing something quite frequently.
But there doesn't seem to be any information on several things, such as how this process works (e.g. who decides to do a new release? and who decides which fixes to apply?) nor how the software is configured - i.e. what the format of the configuration files actually is.
All of this makes it very difficult for others to help out.