Doing A Launchpad Release Manager Rotation

I'm doing a release manager rotation for Launchpad this week, helping see us to the rollout of Launchpad 10.03. It's been a nice experience, and I've learned a lot about various aspects of Launchpad and our releases that I would not have learned otherwise. I'm still amazed at how much time we invest in a release as compared to development time when we only have 4 week development cycles.

Here's a comment I wrote on Facebook after co-workers commented on a status update where I wrote something similar to the above.

Think about all the wasted dev time we have around release, and with short cycles anyway.

I lose a week on a release manager rotation. Devs on our teams lose 3-5 days depending on what is going on. Continual deployment would keep us moving forward much faster. There are some technical issues for Launchpad to do this, and also, there is some progress being made towards a form of this.

But still, I want to think about coding and quality of features not release semantics. :-)

I've written before that release is a word give too much weight in web development. Having done a rotation as an actual release manager now, I still feel the same.  Again, I'm hopeful this is changing, at least somewhat, for Launchpad, but I want to continue to talk about how we can move to continual deployments. I see nothing but positives to be gained from this, assuming the blocking technical issues can be overcome.

Link | Posted by deryck on March 30, 2010 | 0 comments

Book Review: Making an Elephant

Making an Elephant by Graham Swift

This book on his life and writing is good, though not as good as other books I've read like this. I enjoyed the personal passages about his life, more than the thoughts on his craft. The chapter written on his father's death stands out as a moving essay.

I have always been a fan of Graham Swift's fiction, so as a fan, I enjoyed this book. It's not as good as others like this I've read. Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson is better by a contemporary British author, and Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor is a great example by an American author. Still, fans of Swift and other writers might enjoy this.

Every time I read a book like this, I wish for more books like this in my field (computer programming, for those who don't know me). I would love to read from great hackers on how they became the person they are, how life has affected craft, and so on.

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Link | Posted by deryck on March 8, 2010 | 0 comments