Radar 21

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Roadmap (what?)

Next Six Weeks

• Week 21 (Radar number)—August 23—run hard on the Pivot milestone
• Week 22—August 30—final push on Pivot; announce the 1.0 refund; transition to Balanced Shutdown
• Week 23—September 6—Balanced Shutdown, with a focus on double-entry accounting
• Week 24—September 13—Balanced Shutdown, esp. double-entry accounting; probably meet with the CPA for final review early in this week
• Week 25—September 20—Balanced Shutdown, focus on cleaning up history (e.g.)
• Week 26—September 27—final push on Balanced Shutdown; refund 1.0 money!

Longer Term

[chadwhitacre]

Queues (what?)

Open	Closed	Queue	Description
0	23	Violations	private communication amongst the safety team
9	8	Security	private communication with security researchers
4	25	Legal	private communication with our counsel
7	855	Support	private communication with users
1	0	L2 Support	escalated support issues
6	32	Team Review	public review of applications for new teams
112	?	Errors	production errors
0	1,617	Vendors, etc.	private communication with our vendors (also includes low-volume mailboxes: safety and security)
24	86	Pivot	a milestone
14	38	Balanced Shutdown	a milestone
9	6	Milestones	all milestones
6	473	PR Review	work in the final stage before deployment
27	1,605	PRs	all work in progress
761	4,284	Issues	public communication with contributors

[chadwhitacre]

Not much movement on the queue numbers since last week, but what's masked is the fact that we landed a lot of work on the Pivot. I've just updated the queue comment to include closed tickets as well (I couldn't get this easily for the Errors queued, which is collapsed anyway; #293), so we'll be able to see that easier in the future.

[chadwhitacre]

Oh ... I also changed the definition of L2 Support from "assigned to Chad" to "tagged L2," so that it can be a bit more future-proof. :-) I didn't go back and tag previous L2 Support issues, so we're starting with 0 closed this week.

[chadwhitacre]

GitHub 0. Security 7.

[chadwhitacre]

@hurlothrumbo has once again drawn my attention to the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an edition of the complete works of science fiction/fantasy author Jack Vance. It's a fairly large-scale project undertaken along what we here will recognize as open-source lines, remarkable because it's not a software project.

While coping with the first influx of volunteers, Paul [Rhoads, project founder and "Editor-in-Chief"] had also to define essential work processes and to assign specific managers to implement them. Even at this early stage, Paul realised that if the project were to move from inspired idea to concrete conclusion, solid foundations would need to be laid before volunteers launched into helter-skelter effort. These foundations were designed by John Foley, who continued, very quietly, to guide and support the Editor-in-Chief through years of subsequent negotiations and manoeuvres. Without John’s vision and understanding of how to design a large and complex project, the VIE could never have come to fruition.

His contribution, or the problem it addressed, is not easy to articulate. Essentially it involved ensuring that volunteer talents were harnessed, but within the necessary standards, and in harmony with the project’s goals. At times this involved reconciling contradictory drives, trends and aspirations. The VIE could only have been viable with a large—and constantly replenished—stream of volunteers, who could be recruited only via the internet. The VIE had therefore to remain ‘open’ throughout its life to continue to draw in volunteers and maintain momentum. But recruiting the volunteers was only half—and the easier half—of the story.

Success would require that the volunteer effort was used correctly. Inevitably this involved imposing standards, procedures and even deadlines upon hundreds of unpaid individuals.

[...]

In the very early days John Foley defined and promulgated a ‘Master Plan’. The ‘Master Plan’ was more than a document. It was a set of basic concepts, the limpidity of which masked their wisdom only from the obtuse or inattentive. Paul Rhoads has admitted how, initially, he was dismayed at its tedious and cumbersome requirements; but time was to change his mind. The essence of the Master Plan may be expressed in four points[.]

Points (2) through (4) are common currency in the open-source world:

• All work must be traceable, undoable, and reviewed.
• Work must be systematically archived and publicly tracked.
• The electronic tools used in the project must be uniform or approved.

The first holds more interest:

• The work, divided into natural sections, was to be executed by teams, and team heads were to be named by the Editor-in-Chief. The responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief was that project work move expeditiously forward or, to put it another way, his role was to execute the Master Plan. The team heads, working independently, were responsible for the work itself, including the definition of structure of their team, their team’s work procedures and membership—subject only to the following provisions:

This puts me in mind of one of Fred Brooks' main points in The Mythical Man-Month, that the way to organize large projects is through delegation. Seems obvious when I type it. :-)

It's an inspiring account! It makes me want to do a better job of organizing our work here. "We knew that, to keep our growing number of volunteers eager and keen, we had to keep them occupied and focused." It's also chastening: the VIE, and its leadership, are not without detractors. Truly, every thesis calls forth its antithesis.

[chadwhitacre]

Also interesting: "Performative Development. Watch real game development every Tuesday and Thursday from 1PM to 5PM CET on the Twitch.tv channel. Get a new update based on player feedback (almost) every weekend." @ericmeltzer is doing something similar with the TOC Go Bag (backers-only post):

Until the Go Bag is shipped, I'll be streaming from my workshop every morning starting at 5:45AM Pacific on Periscope, so you can watch me get the remaining stuff sorted out, live.

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 5.

[techtonik]

My experiments with LXD got blocked by lxc/incus#830 (comment) after I dropped Ubuntu and got only Fedora left. Tried to reinstall Ubuntu 15.04, but got UbuntuStudio after I wanted Blender to come in. Then I wasn't able to setup Alt+Shift to switch keyboard layouts, Alt+~ to switch windows inside of application.

Added AppVeyor logo to shields.io badges/shields#513 so that its status icon is clearly distinguishable from Travis. Needed to Aspen repo.

Plans to complete my education about accruel accounting and learn about double entry accounting.

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 5, GitHub 4, Security 8.

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 5, GitHub 0, Security 8.

Lunch 1, Coffee 1. Bbiab! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Lunch 0. Coffee 0.5. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Not gonna land charging in arrears before payday today.

I've been running hard on gratipay/gratipay.com#3718. I'm gonna review teams and run payday (#323) and then try to land paint-the-walls. If it goes well I'm gonna try to get a jump on cached values. That seems like a big chunk of the crap left on Pivot. After that it's about streamlining Team application, review, and management. And a few other things.

[chadwhitacre]

Vendors, etc. 0

[chadwhitacre]

You know what? We are doing something really, really interesting: #324. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

L2 Support 0.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, payday is done (#323), and I'm out of ideas on #324 for now. Gonna take five and then hopefully bring gratipay/gratipay.com#3718 in for a landing.

[...] and why?

#316, that's why. :-0

[chadwhitacre]

I am so friggin' confident that we are doing exactly what we're doing.

I love you all. :-)

                        📰
✌️ 🎸              🔥

[chadwhitacre]

I was talking with @hurlothrumbo today. I was saying that I feel like I'm on the outside, but trying to build a new inside. I'm on the outside of https://abc.xyz/. Our new inside is:

Do I believe in our new inside? Am I inside it?

[chadwhitacre]

This Google alert just came through:

Seems that the question was pruned, however. :-(

http://help.appveyor.com/discussions/questions/1615-gratipay

[chadwhitacre]

The walls, they are painted. 😫

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

For @webmaven: "Cohort Analysis with Python". :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 5, GitHub 0, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 0. Alright!

[chadwhitacre]

Cached values. Let's do this. 😤 👊

[chadwhitacre]

https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/labels/Cached%20Values

[chadwhitacre]

gratipay/gratipay.com#3599

[chadwhitacre]

🌕

[chadwhitacre]

I feel really good about gratipay/gratipay.com#3718. It's sitting really well with me. I like going to gratipay.com again! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

🌕

[chadwhitacre]

☔

[techtonik]

!m @whit537

[chadwhitacre]

O.o

[chadwhitacre]

:-)

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Taking some down time today, gonna try to pick up again this evening. I'm hoping that I can knock out the remainder of Cached Values tonight, and then Team Workflow tomorrow. There are six more tickets on Pivot that aren't under those two headings, which we'll have to figure out what to do with.

My goal is to land the Pivot and publish a 1.0 refund blog post on Tuesday night, with an email blast to follow on Wednesday. Then on Wednesday and Thursday I want to bring arrears in for a landing with @rorepo ahead of payday on Thursday.

If anyone else has any cycles just grab a Pivot ticket and start a PR! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, I 💩ed out last night. :)

Earlier start this morning, working down by Inbox/GitHub queues and then picking up with Cached Values.

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 5, GitHub 0, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 0

[chadwhitacre]

Oh no! It's Monday again! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)

Our reputation has slipped from "Excellent" to "Good." :-(