All posts by qrdl

aka joadavis
oped, remote work, software engineering

Link refresh: remote vs co-located

A while ago I linked to this article – http://martinfowler.com/articles/remote-or-co-located.html – about remote vs co-located teams and which are more effective. I think it still holds up as a good article for guiding thoughts about how to make your team more useful whether co-located or remote or some blend of the two.

Most of the teams I’ve worked with in the last 10+ years have been a mix, with some chunk of the team located at one or two sites and a few more scattered around the world. In those cases, it has helped to get the office-located teams to think about “remote first” modes of communication. Sometimes that becomes “lowest common denominator” communication, where if any one person is on the phone then everyone does the meeting from the phone at their desk. That does help level the field, but when possible it is better to bring everyone up to a higher level with video conferencing or collaborative document editing.

It also helps for the Scrum Master or manager or leads to coach the team about how to communicate with everyone in a way that each team member is not left out or marginalized. That is a great topic of discussion in retrospective meetings.

k8s, kubernetes, OpenStack

Kubernetes and Cloud thoughts

I should have a lot more to say on this, but I’m still learning. You see, back in November 2019 my job changed, and I went from being full time developer on an OpenStack based cloud offering and a contributor upstream, to being a full time developer on a Kubernetes based cloud offering and trying to figure out how to fit in to the Kubernetes community. It has been a little slow figuring out how to get in to this new community that follows the directions of Google. I am fortunate to have some coworkers who have some experience in the area, and that has helped greatly. But (and I’m not surprised by this) my first attempt at a simple change upstream to kubernetes/kubernetes has been torpedoed by the oddities of the community. In a nutshell, the published Logging Conventions apparently only apply to some of the code, and that detail is not stated anywhere. So the learning process will continue.

construction toys, review

Review: Mini Building Blocks Roadrunner

This was a purchase during an earlier road trip this year (flew to Vegas, drove through St George, Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon dam, Hoover Dam, Red Rock Canyon, Vegas). There were a number of animal themed sets at the Grand Canyon gift shop and this Roadrunner stood out. These “mini building blocks” are nanoblock compatible (look like LEGO bricks but 1/12th the size).

Mini building block roadrunner
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construction toys

New category: construction toys

I’ve already ranted about how the concept of LEGO and software architecture often get abused in an attempt to over-simplify a design. But I do really love LEGO and building things. I find it is a good contrast between building programs and assembling a model. And I know many other nerds will geek out about LEGO. So I’m adding a category for “construction toys” – any toy that you can build up out of small, modular parts.

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Uncategorized

Another Year of Travel

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There are lots of reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately. And lots of excuses. Definitely one of them is that I have been traveling a lot more.

I thought last year when I had my first intercontinental business trip was remarkable. I’m just a kid from a small town in Oregon, so getting to travel to Dublin for an OpenStack PTG was mind blowing. I got to see a real castle and eat local foods. And got stuck in a record snowstorm. #Snowpenstack

But since then I’ve been to Denver twice for PTGs, did a 2 week Agile training and cloud team gathering in Nuremberg, and have made several trips with my family. And in another week I’ll be in Nuremberg again.

I didn’t imagine myself being a world traveler when I was growing up, but I do like it.

What prompted this post is that recently one of the OpenStack PTLs and a long time contributor posted to the openstack-discuss mail list that he would not be traveling to Shanghai for the next conference. He made a bigger deal about it than necessary, and you could argue some of it was motivated by driving traffic to his blog. [UPDATE: I reread this and it sounded much more accusatory and harsh than I intended. Chris is not that kind of guy.  Sorry about that.] (He included a link in his email. Just Google for “Chris Dent remote maintainer”) You could also see it was politically motivated, as he listed out his environmental concerns with air travel and social concerns with China.

While Chris raised some valid concerns, I don’t totally agree with his conclusion. I have some ill-formed opinions about politicizing weather science and fear mongering, so I won’t go on about that. And I agree with his points about the conferences being exclusive parties. But I believe that there are still good reasons to travel.

If a country is misbehaving or worse, abusing its citizens, I think cutting it off from the rest of the world is going to make things worse, not better. I tend to take the attitude of Rick Steves that travel can be a political act. Yes, ther can be many negative things about tourism. But the simple fact that getting someone out of their small corner of the world so they can recognize there are other people in other countries is huge. Not everyone can be the head of a country, but if you get to know the people in a country (or many countries) it will influence your view and that spreads out to people around you and influences your voting. And when the people are engineers you are sharing code with, it makes your interaction with them so much more effective.

So if my presentations are accepted to the Shanghai summit are accepted, I will try to go. Of course I will be cautious about what I pack. But if I can help influence some engineers in China that Americans are not all just big jerks that should be taken advantage of, then I will try.

OpenStack

OpenStack Denver PTG – Sept 2018 – Notetaking

I take notes, especially in big meetings, as a way to keep my attention on the meeting (and avoid falling asleep). Sometimes it comes in handy, as my memory isn’t great anyway. Sometimes the benefit is questionable, as my notes might not make sense to anyone else, especially if they aren’t in an OpenStack session.

I took the majority of the notes for the Monasca sessions at the Denver 2018 OpenStack Program Teams Gathering.  Take a look – https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/monasca-ptg-stein – and I did the same last time around – https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/monasca-ptg-rocky .

As a sample, I also took notes for the parts of the OpenStack-Helm sessions that I was interested in.  I didn’t slap them in to the OS-Helm etherpad as I am just peripherally part of the team and didn’t want to break their flow.  But I’m including them below in raw format just for backup/reference.

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