All Hands April 1, 2004

1. We haven't met in a couple of weeks due to travel and other scheduling issues. Welcome to our newest employees: Lisa Dusseault, David Surovell and Brian Kirsch.

• Lisa joins us as a development manager and standards architect. She has lots of experience with the IETF. Katie and Lisa are in the process of splitting up the work Katie has been doing in some way that makes sense for Katie and Lisa to share.

• David is going to start by working on wxWidgets, specifically to make it really great on the Mac.

• Brian is our email person. He's now looking at which libraries Chandler might use.

• Petunia is the "brick" of a bulldog wandering around.

2. PyCon update

• A. Mitch, Ted and Jeffrey Harris attended PyCon last week. Mitch gave the Keynote and spent time at the conference. Ted and Jeffrey went to the conference early and participated in the sprints sessions. It was good to go out and spend time with the Python Community. There seemed to be a lot of good will. The BoF^? session was attended by probably 10% of all conference attendees and ran late because there was a lot of interest. This is very exciting and encouraging for us.

• B. Sprint -- 4 day joint programming effort. 4 or 5 other people at the sprint most of the time. Lots of feedback. Much of it is not surprising, but we have much more specific information now about what is confusing and difficult to figure out. Some folks want to keep going with Chandler; this is pretty much all one could hope for.

• C. There was also lots of interaction with other Python groups. Some very interesting work on voice over IP, we'll have future discussions about what we might do to make things easier for folks like this to be successful. There were a number of people using Python to build applications, as well as using it for scripting tasks. The importance of investment in core Python development is also apparent. It became clear that there are a number of ways Chandler could interact with the Python community, and we'll be looking into these.

3. Chandler Communinty. It's also clear we want to have a focused commitment of resources to working with a Chandler developer community. This will take part of someone's time to sort out what we might do with potential developers. There's a trick about how to add this activity without causing other activities to fall behind. We'll do something about this, as it's a major long term investment. We need to learn to encourage development that's not tightly coordinated. We need coordination at some of the core topics, but this doesn�t scale and Chandler won't reach its potential if we don't figure out how to add loosely coupled development. In a related topic, we'll need to make sure that no one person (for example, Mitch) becomes a bottleneck. So Mitch will work on how to empower people to go off and do things without Mitch being so centrally involved day-to-day.

4. 0.4. Next week we will have some presentations from the working groups on the plan for the 0.4 release. People working on this during this week; management committee will try to integrate work of various groups on Tuesday. We'll also work on getting back to a schedule for milestone releases again. The high level goal of the 0.4 release is to make chandler experimentally usable for a certain set of tasks.

-- MitchellBaker - 02 Apr 2004