Standup report: June 8th, 2018

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

Project report

Over the last six months, we've done:

  • monthly library updates

  • revamped static assets management infrastructure

  • service maintenance

  • fixed the textarea to be resizeable (Thanks, Arai!)

The monthly library updates have helped with reducing technical debt. That takes a few hours each month to work through.

Paul redid how Standup does static assets. We no longer use django-pipeline, but instead use gulp. It works muuuuuuch better and makes it possible to upgrade to Djagno 2.0 soon. That was a ton of work over the course of a few days for both of us.

We've been keeping the Standup service running. That includes stage and production websites as well as stage and production IRC bots. That also includes helping users who are stuck--usually with accounts management. That's been a handful of hours.

Arai fixed the textareas so they're resizeable. That helps a ton! I'd love to get more help with UI/UX fixing.

Some GitHub stats:

GitHub
======

  mozilla/standup: 15 prs

    Committers:
             pyup-bot :     6  (  +588,   -541,   20 files)
               willkg :     5  (  +383,   -169,   27 files)
                 pmac :     2  ( +4179,   -223,   58 files)
               arai-a :     1  (    +2,     -1,    1 files)
                  g-k :     1  (    +3,     -3,    1 files)

                Total :        ( +5155,   -937,   89 files)

    Most changed files:
      requirements.txt (11)
      requirements-dev.txt (7)
      standup/settings.py (5)
      docker-compose.yml (4)
      standup/status/jinja2/base.html (3)
      standup/status/models.py (3)
      standup/status/tests/test_views.py (3)
      standup/status/urls.py (3)
      standup/status/views.py (3)
      standup/urls.py (3)

    Age stats:
          Youngest PR : 0.0d: 466: Add site-wide messaging
       Average PR age : 2.3d
        Median PR age : 0.0d
            Oldest PR : 10.0d: 459: Scheduled monthly dependency update for May


  All repositories:

    Total merged PRs: 15


Contributors
============

  arai-a
  g-k
  pmac
  pyup-bot
  willkg

That's it for the last six months!

Switching to swag-driven development

Do you use Standup?

Did you use Standup, but the glacial pace of fixing issues was too much so you switched to something else?

Do you want to use Standup?

We think there's still some value in having Standup around and there are still people using it. There's still some technical debt to fix that makes working on it harder than it should be. We've been working through that glacially.

As a project, we have the following problems:

  1. The bulk of the work is being done by Paul and Will.

  2. We don't have time to work on Standup.

  3. There isn't anyone else contributing.

Why aren't users contributing? Probably a lot of reasons. Maybe everyone has their own reason! Have I spent a lot of time to look into this? No, because I don't have a lot of time to work on Standup.

Instead, we're just going to make some changes and see whether that helps. So we're doing the following:

  1. Will promises to send out Standup project reports every 6 months before the All Hands and in doing this raise some awareness of what's going on and thank people who contributed.

  2. We're fixing the Standup site to be clearer on who's doing work and how things get fixed so it's more likely your ideas come to fruition rather than get stale.

  3. We're switching Standup to swag-driven development!

What's that you say? What's swag-driven development?

I mulled over the idea in my post on swag-driven development.

It's a couple of things, but mainly an explicit statement that people work on Standup in our spare time at the cost of not spending that time on other things. While we don't feel entitled to feeling appreciated, it would be nice to feel appreciated sometimes. Not feeling appreciated makes me wonder whether I should spend the time elsewhere. (And maybe that's the case--I have no idea.) Maybe other people would be more interested in spending their spare time on Standup if they knew there were swag incentives?

So what does this mean?

It means that we're encouraging swag donations!

  • If your team has stickers at the All Hands and you use Standup, find Paul and Will and other Standup contributors and give them one!

  • If there are features/bugs you want fixed and they've been sitting in the queue forever, maybe bribing is an option.

For the next quarter

Paul and I were going to try to get together at the All Hands and discuss what's next.

We don't really have an agenda. I know I look at the issue tracker and go, "ugh" and that's about where my energy level is these days.

Possible things to tackle in the next 6 months off the top of my head:

If you're interested in meeting up with us, toss me an email at willkg at mozilla dot com.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.