Yellow Squad Weekly Tricks: July 20

Summary:

• bac: Don't use seteuid with bzr
• frankban: Using deb package recipes with Distribute-based Python packages
• frankban: os.path.expanduser uses $HOME to expand '~'
• frankban: In tests, use a temporary home plus a bzr whoami before bzr commit

Yellow Squad Weekly Project Report: July 20

Summary:

• This was gmb's last week with us. Farewell from Yellow squad, and best wishes for leading Green squad!
• We're still hiring for five openings in a very cool Python & cloud position, so please apply soon! The interview process largely consumed 3/5 of the squad; next week it will affect 3/4 of us. We've had some good interviewees, and we hope to have more.
• We did not have as many test runs this week because of the interviews. Our successful test run from last week stopped this week after 42 consecutive passing runs, after which we had instances of 974617/1011847 and 1014916.
• The parallel testing machines in the data center are reportedly ready for configuration and we are now waiting for IS to get to the task.
• We tested a new package of the lpsetup code, fixed some problems, and have a working package for both the developer use case and the testing use case. The next step is to design the interactive story.
• The lpsetup code has a second integration test, this time for the LXC approach.

Yellow Squad Weekly Topics: July 13

Summary:

• benji: Juju-based integration tests are a success for incremental value
• bac/gary_poster: Is it ever OK to knowingly check in broken code?
• gary_poster: Not meeting our weekly goals

Yellow Squad Weekly Tricks: July 13

Summary:

• benji/gary_poster: Different ways to keep Juju from forcing you to repeatedly accept SSH keys

Yellow Squad Weekly Project Report: July 13

Summary:

• Parallel tests are running very well this week, with 37 successful runs in a row so far...even though we haven't changed anything.
• The parallel testing machines in the data center will reportedly be ready for us next week.
• The lpsetup code's refactoring is again at a usable milestone, and we are ready to test a new package of the code.
• The lpsetup code has its first integration test, thanks to Juju.
• In the upcoming week we intend to add more integration tests and more developer-friendly features for lpsetup.
• gmb will be leaving us to start his own squad on our team!  In related news, we're hiring.

Yellow Squad Weekly Topics: July 6

Summary:

• gary_poster/benji: Personal feedback loops
• bac/benji/gary_poster: Poorly specified tasks

Intentional duplication of effort: learning and prototyping

When do you want to duplicate effort?  You often want to duplicate learning across a team.  What about prototyping?

Yellow Squad Weekly Tricks: July 6

Summary:

• bac: manage your services together with their supporting infrastructure
• gmb: beware: Launchpad's ec2 command will sometimes silently break if your download cache doesn't have what you need.
• gary_poster/gmb: if you get a weird ec2 result, don't forget about ec2's postmortem option.

Yellow Squad Weekly Project Report: July 6

Summary: We made some good progress, but this week was not as successful as we had hoped.

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 29

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.