Just like last time, we quietly performed a release, triggered by the course we teach. This allows us to test it in this course. Bug-fixing, and possibly finishing half-done features, can happen in the v0.9.x branch, and we can do further v0.9.x releases whenever we like (suggestions welcome).
In the meantime, we could prepare a changelog and release notes, and then make the next v0.9.x release a more broadly advertised one.
If you can, please switch your non-playground code dependencies to this release version. If you cannot, remember to switch it to 0.10.0-SNAPSHOT.
Any development which is done on v0.9.x should, of course, also be merged into master. The cleanest way to do this is to develop on a personal branch, which is branched off master before today, and, when you're finished, merge that branch into both v0.9.x and master.