Not waving but drowning - Latest Comments

Re: Lazy test loading to deal with conflicting django settings

Ferringb — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:04:14 -0000

Realistically what is needed here is for django.settings to 'swivel' it's configuration on the fly- this is the best you can do when dealing w/ globals like this (realistically avoiding said globals is better).

Meanwhile, the issue is partially y'alls doing- y'all pull django.settings in as an import after all. I'd probably shift the django.settings import, and a sys.modules wipe of anything django related into a self.setUp() method...

Not great but with some minor finessing it ought to do the trick. Not a perfect long term thing though- a long term approach you might want to look into is adding a func for importing django targets into global(), one that proxies and is switchable, controlled by setUp().

Personally I'd just go fix that !@*#ing global crap and make it switchable- had patches in the past for django for this, although I don't recall ever seeing them get integrated upstream...

Re: Lazy test loading to deal with conflicting django settings

Michael Hudson-Doyle — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:04:56 -0000

To channel Mr. Collins, mutable global state is bad?

Re: Teambuilding and culture in a distributed workplace

Claire — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:13:10 -0000

Thank you for sharing. You never fail to inspire me to want to do more and be a better custodian of our culture. cvd

Re: Teambuilding and culture in a distributed workplace

Steve Mcinerney — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:28:29 -0000

Dunno if you know some of the detail of that first cake Elliot? When it arrived we were all (and NOT having read the signage) - "No sorry, you must be mistaken. None of us have ordered a cake. Can't be for us. Possibly you have the wrong room? kthxbye".
The waiter returned shortly to confirm yes it was for us in this room, and then we read it. Oops. :-D
- Steve

Re: Teambuilding and culture in a distributed workplace

Team Building Bonanza — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:18:29 -0000

I really enjoyed your story of the two cakes. It is a great example of how everyone can contribute to a positive team feeling, and shows that actions to build a sense of team don't have to be expensive or driven by management. Sometimes its the fun and creative 'gestures' that have the most impact.

I'd love you to share this post as a page on my new Team Building Bonanza website .... if you'd be interested in this, please go to www.team-building-bonanza.com, and follow the 'add your teambuilding stories' link. I think my readers would also enjoy your story. Thanks again for sharing it. Alison.

Re: Teambuilding and culture in a distributed workplace

dholbach — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:40:19 -0000

NICE! :)

Re: Managing a widely distributed engineering team – are weekly reports a good idea?

Greg — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:04:34 -0000

That makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for clarifying. We do all our work remotely and I'm always interested in ways to improve our productivity and communication. Due to the line breaks in the email you posted, and the time of night I read it, I had a hard time following some of your original post.

To be honest, we maintain productivity by using a very flat structure. 1 programmer to 1 project. I've very much wanted email list archives for our HP project, but it never happened and we've ended up duplicating a lot of communications because of it.

Re: Managing a widely distributed engineering team – are weekly reports a good idea?

Elliot Murphy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:41:59 -0000

The outline I posted is misleading, we don't actually just put the number of branches and number of code reviews - we put a link to each branch along with a one or two sentence description of what it is about.

Re: Managing a widely distributed engineering team – are weekly reports a good idea?

Elliot Murphy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:37:52 -0000

It's easy to get people to do their work. It's harder for 25 people to communicate well across 18 different projects when all are working from home and in different timezones. Also, I think the mental exercise of summarizing a weeks worth of accomplishments is a good thing, and having a mail archive of those summaries is immensely useful. I've joined projects several years in, the ones where I was able to dive into the mail archives were by far the easiest to get up to full speed on. It's not so much about keeping a count of tasks every day, each person can easily get a list of their reviews and branches from launchpad.net - providing the link and the description makes it so much easier for people to learn from each other: "Oh, Joe fixed that weird bug, I'll click here and see what the problem turned out to be".

What techniques do you use to communicate well with your team members, and help people know that you are turning out good work?

Re: Managing a widely distributed engineering team – are weekly reports a good idea?

Greg — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:09:59 -0000

It really seems like you are having a hard time getting your team to do their work? I'd feel like you didn't trust me to get my work done if you asked me to keep a count of my tasks every day.

As long as I'm turning out good work, meeting my milestones, and communicating well with my team members, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that an extra weekly essay serves a use. Of course if you were my boss, I'd never tell you that, I'd just write your report and chalk it up to one of the annoyances of my job.

Re: A few words about Ubuntu One servers

Kevin N. Murphy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:05:55 -0000

Interesting and exciting progress

Re: Interested in porting Ubuntu i18n infrastructure from CDBS to debhelper

Elliot Murphy — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:31:41 -0000

Tried enabling disqus comments so that I get a lot less spam and the broken captcha that I had set up will stop blocking people from commenting on my posts.