CTPUG in the Global Python Sprint weekend
On Saturday (May 10th) the Cape Town Python User Group held a Python Sprint meeting as part of the Global Python Sprint weekend. 8 or so of us got together on and off from 10:30am until about 9:30pm at the SynthaSite offices around a table and worked through 10 or so issues in the Python issue database. Thanks to The Other Neil and Simon for most of the organisation effort, and to them and Adrianna, Russell, Jonathan, Jeremy, Brad, and David for coming through and taking part. And thanks to SynthaSite for coffee, coke, crisps, chocolates, and other goodies. According to The Other Neil, we worked on:
A team apart
For about two weeks, ending about two weeks ago, we had a full house of current employees at the SynthaSite offices in Cape Town - which has allowed everyone to get to know everyone else both at work and at play. Over the past two weeks and continuing for another week or so, people have been heading back to the US office or heading to work from there for the known future. The time together was great and necessary, and the time apart is necessary also, but it's hard to not want to see my new and old friends at the office. The offices feel too quiet (although we've got new friends starting next week). It is early days yet, but I know from previous experience how distance can allow one to treat people unfairly - it is easier to disappoint and easier to pretend to forget and easier to believe that the other is being stupid or lazy when you don't see each other regularly. Yes, even geeks.
I'm quite interested in the challenge of making this not happen, and I'm hoping to see how our experiments in project management and communication and structure turn out. I identified tools, process and people as our main strengths that will help us get through this new period, and then realised they were also our greatest challenges. It's amazing how much your outlook can affect how you feel about a prospect like this. If you start out, like I did, with "We've always been good with tools, but...", it leaves you feeling like you're entering a big unknown without much help. But if you say "This might mean having to retool somewhat, but we've learned a lot about getting tools right", it makes you feel up for the fight. I'll try write up my observations as they happen - although this recent three week break wasn't for lack of things to write but more for lack of the energy to write. (I'll try catch up, but no promises...)
Traffic accounting with ulogd, by Stefano
When I first started at the Bandwith Barn, the traffic accounting that such an environment required just wasn't available off-the-shelf or in the open source world. I've often been asked for the hacking combination of scripts and pmacct that maintain the Bandwidth Barn traffic system - which includes "buying" more monthly traffic, setting traffic limits per month per person, up-to-date graphs of usage per protocol and per client available to each company in the Barn, and months of historical data in case of queries or complaints about the billing.
Looks like ulogd, some iptables rules, and a few simple cronned SQL scripts make this a lot easier these days, thanks to this post about ulogd for bandwidth accounting by Stefano.
SynthaSite planning week and boat trip
This past week at SynthaSite has been the first with the full newly-expanded international team together in the Cape Town office. This has been an opportunity to get to know the new hires and for everyone to come together with their ideas and come up with goals, plans, and specifications. Which meant a week with at least one meeting going on at any one time.
A big potential challenge to new hires, especially in management and other senior positions, is balancing their ability to contribute new things to your existing team but not getting swept away with them and hurting the common thread in your team. I must admit that I was a little worried about the decisions being made in meetings I wasn't a part of. This is a bad habit I've picked up over the years, and despite all indicators to the contrary and belief in those involved in the meetings, I couldn't entirely shake it.
On Thursday, the outcomes from the various meetings over the past few days were presented to the whole team. The most striking part of the meeting to me was how those who weren't in the earlier meetings were able to accurately predict the long-term and short-term goals and features and markets and so forth that were presented. The next most striking was how flexible and accepting those who'd spent hours in meetings to come up with these outcomes were of additions and removals from what they presented.
That was a perfect precursor to our reward for the week's work and a celebration of meeting a few internal targets in the last month — a boat trip out from the Cape Town waterfront on Friday afternoon.
Such a trip does have the potential to be a disaster — making a bunch of people wet and cold, forcing them to maintain their balance and their stomach, and otherwise messing with people isn't the best setting if there are issues between your people or if there's nothing binding them already. We did have new hires, after all.
But our new hires are much like the rest of us. No suits or fancy clothes when we're all office-bound. Shoes are optional. But when it comes to work, serious. More experienced than most of us, and older than most of us, but with the same youthful excitement and wonder for the space we're in and what we're doing. They're also just nice people — I've enjoyed watching every possible combination of new and old employee having multiple one-on-one conversations over the past week.
So, no disaster.
The boat trip itself was a lot of fun for me, despite getting absolutely soaked and nearly falling overboard a few times. I guess one has to do it to understand how that can be enjoyable, since I can't think of much to say in explanation. We ended up cutting the trip a bit short to avoid the setting sun and the ensuing cold and to rather have a warm supper in a warm restaurant. The review and exchange of photographs meant many laughs all around, and the shared adventure meant ample topic for discussion.
SynthaSite release 2.2.3
About a week ago, we released the latest iteration of SynthaSite. We had a pretty tough iteration compared to usual - probably the biggest stumbling block being people in the US attending conferences, seeing people, and the travel and recuperation time around that. We managed to do some pretty cool stuff with those of us who had more stable availability (aka being left behind), which makes me very excited about what we can achieve when we're working full steam ahead.
Probably the biggest wins, as expressed by our users, were around styles - we added 22, and also enabled a whole bunch of them to have customisable banners. Behind the scenes, I was pleasantly surprised to see initiative was taken in that we now have some tools to speed up these processes. We've also majorly beefed up our support materials - we have a bunch of new tutorials that are easily available within our site builder, and a number of other goodies. I've been enjoying watching our support systems grow over the past 3-6 weeks - we're starting to see support regulars helping others as well as an increasing proportion of support queries beyond the standard tool familiarisation ones. Two or three rare, but long-standing, bugs have also been squashed as well, which has made a few of our users who had the right combination of factors very happy. With my "process enablement" cap on, it seems that we've now grown confident in our release and update processes after employing them on the past few iterations. That means a lot less stress for everyone involved, and I even think everyone actually is starting to perhaps even sometimes enjoy the QA period - discovering how everything comes together, saving us from face-palming, and so forth.
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