I've been setting up a private Socialtext install using the Socialtext Open Source tarball on wikrad.com for personal use and experimentation. After the install, one of the first things I wanted to do was to set up automated backups of the workspace data.
A bit of hacking later, and I have Socialtext-Backup-S3, a script that will back up all the workspaces on my server into a tarball on my Amazon S3 account.
I think Ingy was the only Socialtexter at OSCON this year. So for the rest of us, the OSCON 2008 Presentations are now online. Any favorites or recommendations? Please comment below.
Internally, Lyssa challenged our developers to make at least one public blog post this week. So here's mine - thanks for the poke, Lyssa. :)
This has been a really great year so far for the Socialtext development team, and Socialtext overall. Ingy called it - 2008 is the year of the wiki. But it's also been a time of much change within our team.
Starting in January (rather abruptly, I might add), we collapsed our several mini-teams into a single dev team, and called it the 'Swarm'. Our product managers worked hard to keep a few steps ahead of developers, developers worked hard to support each other, tackle debt and meet their commitments, and our QA team worked hard to keep up with developers and improve our automation. It's been hard work to be sure, some highs and lows, but we're really starting to come together as a team. This is increasingly evident to me as others take over driving roles in our process.
In January, we started the year off with 4 1-week iterations with a hard stop at the end (a company face to face). We were jumping into the agile swarm with two feet, and hoping we could swim. We collectively stumbled through our new process, developing it as we went. For January, I put in a lot of extra work to get iterations set up and fleshed out, reasonably balanced using the best intuition we could find. After the face-to-face, we modified our process to work on a two week iteration, and formally made the iteration lead a role, attracting one of our talented seniour developers, Shawn Devlin. Since then, Shawn has done a great job leading the iterations. I feel shawn has kept us at a steady pace, where we're pushing ourselves, but not thrashing with too much. We've been regular in our attacks against our technical debt, and took a big step of completely removing Alzabo as a dependency. (Those of you intimate with the code will appreciate all the work that went into that).
Stepping back as Shawn took over the iteration lead reins was great - I could focus on our releases, and some core development work. I could get my head right down into the problems, and had complete trust in Shawn (and the people he was working with) to make good decisions. Creating releases with Ken Pier was fun and challenging as we iterated towards a standard release process that fit well with our new development process. We kept the good parts of past process (hopefully), and changed it where it made sense such that now we have a pretty standardized process AND several people that all know how to do it. Documenting the process in our Above the Flow process wiki has allowed us to start a rotating 'pumpking' or release manager role. It has been a great way to make sure the corners of our system are documented and that we're not as dependent on particular people.
As others start creating our latest releases, I'm enjoying stepping back again, and re-focusing on other new problems.
And I tag stash to make a blog post out here.
I through a FreeGeek connection, I was invited to talk on a panel for the Vancouver Knowledge Management-ers. Despite it being at 7:30am, I agreed. Here are the notes I'll be taking to speak with, for what they're worth.
About me - I'm a core developer at Socialtext, several years of experience using and deploying wikis.
About Socialtext - http://socialtext.com
I'm going to talk first about personal experience with wikis and collaboration, then about some general patterns, and finally about Socialtext's 4 main use-cases.
I like this geeky meme of sharing your shell history:
history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
76 cd
51 ll
33 vi
26 svk
26 ssh
24 perl
21 iterad
16 wikrad
14 dtrad
13 sb
-k1 is redundant since sort uses the first column by default.
contributed by daniel on Apr 17 10:07pm
70 ls
68 cd
39 less
29 st-admin
27 cdcur
24 rb
19 st-config
16 vi
16 sta
16 jobs
contributed by Rick Scott on May 8 5:43am
