[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Colin Wass
Member since: 2000-03-28 21:49:27
Last Login: N/A
Notes: I'm back after an extended absence. Some things you might like to know about me: I've been a coder for a very long time, starting out on FORTRAN in the early 80's, eventually learning C, Perl, PHP and a bunch of others. I like politics (Canadian), philosophy, good wine and challenging problems. I don't like computer games. I've been involved in International Standards for almost 10 years. Originally working on SQL, more recently on IT security standards. If you really need to know, the group is officially called Canadian Advisory Council on IT Security (CACITS), advising the Standards Council of Canada (SCC)for ISO/ITC JTC1 SC27. I work in the telecommunications industry, focused primarily on responding to security issues in our products. I also play a role in business management and operations for the line of business (department)I'm in. My position is also responsible for (again within the business unit) dealing with the issues that arise from utilizing Open Source products inn some of our solutions. I've been involved with OpenSource since the mid 1990's. I focus mostly on FreeBSD, but that's an issue of comfort and experience more than anything else. I have made minor contributions to some projects in the past, but nothing to get overly excited about.
Anyhow, playing on a personal project (calendar and project management system for GTK on BSD) I realized one of my bad habits might have applicability to a wider audience. During the development stage, a required file in my world is called "developer.notes". The point is pretty straight forward, it's a repository of my thoughts, rants, comments, etc about the code I'm working on. I never allow it to leave the project (i.e. no one who hasn't worked on the software will see my notes). It captures almost everything, since it's convenient, it's a great way to think with my keyboard and I know it won't ship as part of the final package. It is, however, exceptionally useful as a reminder, developer documentation, whatever.
Some sample paragraph openings (I see no need to share the entire note set):
Thoughts for evolution...apparently MySQL can dump as XML, so...
Look! I documented the data structures.
Next up, start building even more happy little dialog boxen.
This is horrifying, I'm not even half way to alpha and...
You get the idea, I hope. If you find this a useful idea, please use it and share. If you've already been doing this, well done. Otherwise, have a great week-end.
After the monthly operations review, I've actually started serious thinking about what the required elements of a support model would need to be for those products that have an Open Source software base. From a corporate perspective, this is actually harder than it seems, but an interesting problem. Anyone who's managed a large, geographically diverse support group probably has some idea of what I'm trying to do.
An interesting piece of fallout from my efforts to deal with supporting Open Source software in proprietary hardware scattered all over the world is an examination of the nature of supportability and communications system resiliency. If there's anything worth discussing here, I'll put together an article and post it. If not, then I probably won't. We'll see how I feel and what happens.
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