OK, the week has be epic so far! That's why I didn't blog regularly
as I usually try to do during sprints and conferences. Still we
achieved a LOT of work here... I wouldn't even know where to start
to list all the topics we touched here. Good energy going on still,
although we see more and more cases of "OK, I need a break". :-)
I kept playing the agile coach here, we had our daily standup
meetings, which was great to keep everyone informed of what was
going on, or any identified blockers. So our Kanban really gave the
nice results we were looking for: visbility and pace. But the most
important is that it doesn't seem to have been perceived by the
people here as a constraint but as an enabler, which is good:
people first! That's what KDE is about.
That's one of the last pictures I took where you can see our sticky
notes. We just spent some time to clean up the window of those
sticky notes to fill them in an [iceScrum](http://www.icescrum.org)
instance. The Plasma people are on board trying to experiment with
a new way of keeping up with their engineering practices... Let's
try to control the chaos! We'll see how it goes with that
experiment in the next few weeks.
So, I wasn't online much yesterday, mostly trying to recover from
my traveling in the early morning. I had only four hours of sleep
before jumping in my plane toward Amsterdam, but the trip was
fairly uneventful and I arrived safely in Nijmegen... I admit I
slacked quite a lot after that and caught myself falling asleep
more than once at sebas' place.
Yesterday we had the now traditional state of the union
presentations to know where we are, and what are the goals of the
different participants... Today the work really started, discussion
topics for the week got listed, and I turned out being the agile
coach setting up a small Kanban giving maximum visibility on the
work going on during the sprint.
As we're moving using bikes here (it's netherlands after all), and
since sebas' let us use his front windows for the kanban, let me
present you the current result of the Tokamak 5 bootstrapping,
"Bikes and Sticky Notes":
As usual now our goal is to move as many of those sticky notes from
the left to the right, we'll see how much of those will appear and
travel on that window during the week!
Since even before the start of Tokamak4, it has been pitched as a
"three in one" sprint. But that was without counting on the Solid
people. In the great tradition of hardware awareness in KDE, we're
doing our job correctly only if Solid gets unnoticed by the user...
and nobody noticed that almost all the core "metalworkers" were
attending Tokamak4.
So we used the opportunity to have a Solid meeting to summarize the
current situation of our infrastructure, and to make plans for
2010. That includes quite a few of clean ups on our stack, but also
more ambitious and cool stuff like reporting devices reachable via
the network. If you're interested in details, I sent
[a mail summarizing the Solid meeting at Tokamak4](http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-hardware-devel/2010-February/000701.html),
and you should probably
[subscribe to kde-hardware-devel](https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-hardware-devel)
if you're not there yet.
This week-end I attended the Tokamak Mark II, so the second Plasma
developers sprint. I was a really packed week-end, but that's
really enjoyable to have every body at hands. It's of course a
pleasure to team up again with very good friends like Aaron,
Alexis, Rich and the humongous Sebas.
It's also nice to have everybody on the deck ready for action. And
action we had, lots of different topics got covered: from the
framework itself, to the appearance of the shell, it's interaction
with the other major part of the desktop (namely kwin), the
integration of the features from Qt kinetic, etc.
Personally I tried to focus as much as possible on our service
framework, so for that I'm writing a library which will help
delegating all the service work to
[Jolie](http://www.jolie-lang.org). It's not there yet, but we're
definitely seeing progresses. I can currently write a program which
loads Jolie's metaservice, fires up a service description and talks
to it. It "just" needs to be wrapped into a nice API now.
[Jolie](http://www.jolie-lang.org) is really a pleasant piece of
software to work with.
Also on the first day, I talked about my new pet project: Zanshin.
A new todo/action management software, I'm using it daily for a
couple of weeks already without major issues. Of course it's still
a bit rough, and I have great plans for it in order to help people
to integrate it in there workflow. I want something simple and
flexible. I'll probably blog more about that in the coming weeks.
I'll end this post with a quote I used in my talk about Zanshin:
> If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open
> to everything. -- Shunryu Suzuki
I expect a 10 page essay about this quote on my desk next week.
;-)
