Sharing the love

Wednesday November 30, 2005
Since I often use this space to complain or talk about tragedy in various forms[1], I thought I should balance it out.

Divmod is doing awesome. I can't wait to show you all some applications! Our team is fantastic.

In the infrastructure, we have some great stuff in Mantissa, which I've mentioned in previous posts. Today JP and I merged the "Offering" branch, which sets up a structure for code that plugs in to Mantissa as a product with public functionality in its own database and private functionality that users get access to when they create their accounts or when an administrator grants it to them.

We have code which acts as a telephone server and records calls, as well as responding to DTMF signals (you pushing the buttons on your phone), thanks to Allen Short[2].

We've got a new mail server that receives email and puts it into a browser, and view the message as well as it's MIME attachments, thanks to Moe.

Amir has been keeping it all together, working on the Quotient stuff with Moe, and keeping our focus sharp. In addition to re-designing our entire customer experience for a re-launch, Amir has been exuding one of the qualities of a really good manager: not one second of the team's time is being spent in useless meetings or procedural issues - it feels like Divmod runs itself.

Finally, I've had some time to do some blogging, to talk to people on the team on a regular basis, polish our tools, and start engaging the community. After years of slogging away in the open source salt mines it's really nice to see patches which do things that we need spontaneously emerge from contributors on a semi-regular basis. There are things happening behind the scenes in the community that I'm even more excited about.[3]




[1]: Sadly, I fear I may need to again soon - I almost didn't post this entry because despite all this great news, as I was writing it I received some bad tidings about both of Ying's grandmothers' health failing rather badly, simultaneously. I decided it's probably best not to let the bad vibes drown everything out though.

[2]: If you click on that link you'll probably notice it's taken a toll on him. The standards related to voice on the internet are not pretty things. ;-)

[3]: Hear that, Alex? Things are happening, aren't they?