FAD Fedora Talk 2009, Day 2.

Today started with a bang — or maybe it didn’t. I don’t know, because for the first time in something like two years I managed to oversleep, missing my alarm clock by over an hour. That meant rushing around like crazy to get Ian up — actually Eleya did this, bless her heart — and get myself ready too. I ended up about a half hour late to pick up the folks for the FAD, although I did manage to SMS everyone to make sure that first, they knew I was on my way ASAP, and second, they let the folks on IRC know since I couldn’t get in front of a keyboard while making up any time.

Fortunately, everything worked out OK — we were at BusinessPlayce by 9:30am, and since we had been able to leave some of our equipment there overnight, thanks to the awesome Paul Delagrange, we were able to spring right into action. Jeff Ollie and Jared Smith immediately got to work on the Asterisk streaming and recording bits, Ian was back at work on his web front end, Jon Stanley was cobbling away on the various problems we’d found in our troubleshooting docs, and John Poelstra and I started working on updating all the use cases linked from our game plan.

By lunch we were well on our way to having on demand recording and streaming starting and stopping, along with reminders being issued in the call and to each new caller coming to the conference. This latter part is obviously useful since by law callers need to be aware that they’re being recorded not only at the beginning of a call, but also if they join partway through. Jared Smith also has customized Fedora Talk so that one can call an extension from a registered client to record a personalized name for one’s extension.

We did encounter some bugs in the latest Asterisk, but thanks to the fact that Jared runs with their developer crowd, we already have bugs filed and hope to receive fixes in the next update that will take care of some of those issues. I worked quite a bit on trying to put together a more logical workflow for the Fedora Talk web site, and I’ve put a copy of that work — a little further along than the one Jon Stanley kindly posted earlier — at my fedorapeople.org space. (It’s also in the fad-ftalk branch of the fedora-web git repo if you’re interested in helping.)

Today we started with one-hour blocks but again our hard time limits didn’t work as well in the afternoon as we cross-collaborated some. I think the blocks of time might be more effective in an environment where the various teams working on sprints at a FAD are separated from each other. That unfortunately lowers the ability to get ad-hoc questions answered quickly, but I suspect it would also allow people to be less distracted by different conversations. Personally, I like both ways of working and don’t think our output suffered badly, although I’d eagerly try a more rigorous approach just to compare and contrast them more easily as an experience.

We have a large output of work to point to in the way of tickets opened, tickets closed, work done, and notes taken on our wiki. I think we probably went from a state of about 20% done on this whole system to something like 80%. One of the big pieces still left is to make sure everything on the asterisk2 server gets correctly “puppetized” so that it can be recreated from bare metal if required. Our Infrastructure team makes very extensive use of Puppet for just this reason.

I found that hacking on the web site was quite enjoyable and I am feeling a little more familiar with git overall since I’m starting to use it more regularly. It’s nice to take some time to work on purely enjoyable technical work, but also to do it in a situation where people are collaborating and enjoying each other’s company too

After the FAD ended at 6:00pm or so, we packed up quickly and headed to my house, where Eleya had prepared an unusually hearty meal for everyone — a big roast beef dinner in the best style of “low country” cuisine. She called it a warmup for Thanksgiving, I called it delicious! Then we took a semi-break from keyboards and LCD screens to play some Rock Band in the basement on the home theater, complete with a lot of smiles and laughs. I got everyone back to the hotel by 11:00 and then headed home to do a bit more web cleanup and write this blog.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be waking — on time! — to take Jon to the train station in Fredericksburg, Ian and Jeff to the airport in Richmond, and then John Poelstra to the Richmond train station since he’s heading to RDU for a few days before he heads home to the other coast. Hopefully I should be home by around 3:00, at which point I suppose I’ll stiffen my upper lip and plunge back into my inbox, which I’m pretty sure is overflowing by this point.

It was another in a line of great Fedora Activity Days, and I want to thank Max Spevack of Red Hat’s Community Architecture team for giving us the funding to make it happen; John, Ian, Jeff, and Jon for traveling to Virginia to put in hard work on a precious weekend; Jared Smith for providing a ton of equipment, expertise, patience, and just plain good humor and good nature; Digium for their support in goodies and hardware; and Paul Delagrange of BusinessPlayce for hosting our hackathon.