Radar 17

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Evolution of gratipay.com (Gource Visualization):

[chadwhitacre]

GAAP is generally accepted accounting procedures.

[chadwhitacre]

My main focus this week is gratipay/gratipay.com#3539.

[seowyanyi]

Hi all, I'm Yan Yi. Hoping to contribute to gratipay on the software side over the coming weeks :)

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome, @seowyanyi! Thanks! 💃

I've made a ticket just for you to ask any questions you have as you get oriented to developing on Gratipay: #291.

[mattbk]

What: I want to help as much with the Pivot milestones as I can, focusing on those frontend changes I can actually understand.
Why: To help reduce user confusion.

[chadwhitacre]

!m @mattbk

How are we on support? Are there any tickets you'd like me to take a look at?

[mattbk]

Freshdesk 5!

• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2405 - cannot be resolved unless we have a payout method other than PayPal
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2427 - requires team owner to be changed manually (out of my league)
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2624 - fixing missing email verification (out of my league)
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2326 - is a discussion with @whit537
• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2243 - I might be able to deal with, but might take digging into the database if manual changes were made

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, chopped up day. :-/

Inbox 4, GitHub 0, Vendors, etc. 0, Support 5, Legal 5, Security 8, PRs 24, Review 3, Issues 753.

[chadwhitacre]

Sentry 103

[chadwhitacre]

That's a hacked up query to determine the number of unresolved exceptions in Sentry, a queue that we should be tracking and which should ideally be zero. I learned about the format of the cursor querystring parameter from the source. By passing cursor=0:100:0 and varying the 100, which is an offset, we can determine the total number of exceptions in our queue. This was the first way I found to answer that question; there may be an easier/better way.

[chadwhitacre]

Queues (what?)

N	Queue	Description
0	Violations	private communication amongst the safety team
8	Security	private communication with security researchers
5	Legal	private communication with our counsel
5	Support	private communication with users
10	Applications	public review of applications for new teams
103	Errors	production errors
0	Vendors, etc.	private communication with our vendors (also includes low-volume mailboxes: safety and security)
7	Balanced Shutdown	a milestone
14	Pivot	a milestone
9	Milestones	all milestones
3	Review	work in the final stage of development
24	PRs	work in progress
753	Issues	public communication with contributors

My personal queues: Inbox 4, GitHub 0

[chadwhitacre]

I've removed the [email protected] mailbox, because https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvp4AQBoy94 didn't really go anywhere.

[chadwhitacre]

I've upgraded our queue management procedures/documentation in #292, as reflected in the above table.

[chadwhitacre]

One pattern I tried to newly observe here is to make Radar posts self-documenting. I like that we are developing post type patterns for the Radar, such as Queues, Mandrill, and the Map (blockdiag). We should have a howto "Sweep the Radar" that documents the post types, and each post type should either be documented there or have its own howto, and each particular post should link to the doc for that post type. Cf. #279 (comment).

[chadwhitacre]

I'm super-pumped about meeting with a CPA on Wednesday (#285).

[chadwhitacre]

Documenting the Radar done in #295.

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Landed at https://www.facebook.com/CarnegieCoffeeCompany. Gonna work here this morning, meeting with CPA (#285) is this afternoon at 2pm.

[mattbk]

Training this week, so I probably can't do much more until Monday.

On July 29, 2015 8:17:44 AM CDT, Chad Whitacre [email protected] wrote:

Okay! Landed at https://www.facebook.com/CarnegieCoffeeCompany. Gonna
work here this morning, meeting with CPA (#285) is this afternoon at
2pm.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#290 (comment)

Sent from a phone that, although intelligent, is not street smart.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk Okay. FYI I am on vacation next week. I will still kick off the radar on Monday and run payday on Thursday. Other than that I'll be offline.

[chadwhitacre]

Just had a phone call with Aaron (our lawyer). Legal 4!

[chadwhitacre]

I guess I'm focusing on the Balanced Shutdown, since we have a hard external deadline of October 9 on that one. I anticipate that we'll end up paying a CPA a chunk to help with that.

I expect to bring the Pivot in for a landing once Balanced Shutdown is in the hangar. I hope to pay a designer a chunk of money to help us with that one.

[chadwhitacre]

Blech ... but we want Pivot farther along before we start driving traffic for "Refunding 1.0."

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, here's what I'm seeing:

1. We focus on Pivot for August (though we'll also need charging in arrears).
2. Towards the end of August we publish and start promoting "Refunding 1.0." Email blast goes out September 1. We want to push this hard, so that as many people as possible are able to withdraw their balance or start a new Team during September.
3. We spend September 1) beating the drum, 2) paying people out, and 3) running hard on Balanced Shutdown—including the accounting refactor (refactor for double-entry accounting gratipay.com#3618).
4. We run the refunds after the October 1 payday.

That brings us pretty close to the wire with Balanced, but what else is new? It gives us time to do this more righter than otherwise, and gives people time to get their payout.

Who's with me? 📯

[chadwhitacre]

Can Pivot result in a significantly more user-friendly Gratipay?

Greetings! Chad here from the City as a Campus project. I'm having fun implementing your design for the campus map. :-)

So much fun, in fact, that I thought I'd reach out to see if you have any availability in the next few weeks to do some work for us over on Gratipay, which is my main gig. We've got a number of design issues (as you'll see), though we do have a minimal brand guide in place as well as some thinking about information architecture (see also).

I'll be down in the East End this Friday. If you're interested in potentially taking this on, could we get together for 45 minutes then for an initial conversation?

[chadwhitacre]

Trying something new ... I just applied the star priority labels to the issues on the Pivot milestone. Does it make more sense to use the star labels only within active milestones, rather than globally across the repo?

[chadwhitacre]

https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+milestone%3APivot+label%3A%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85 💃

[chadwhitacre]

That failed. I am just a glutton for 🐇 holes, apparently. :-(

[chadwhitacre]

The 🐰 emoji is better, but Alice chased a white 🐇.

[chadwhitacre]

Got a PR going to standardize our nomenclature. Tomorrow I hope to successfully nuke the old tip code (which will involve major test suite cleanup), ahead of gratipay/gratipay.com#3599, which is on that issue listing ... so THERE! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Landed the nomenclature standardization (#117), and I have a PR to nuke the old tip code. After lunch I'm gonna run payday, and then hopefully return to fixing cached values.

[chadwhitacre]

Made with Creative Commons: A book on open business models

Let's write a book that shows the world how sharing can be good for business.

[...]

Our goal is to begin to answer what we consider one of the most important questions of the digital age: how do creators make money to sustain what they do when they are letting the world reuse their work?

[chadwhitacre]

Let's build a business that shows the world how sharing can be good for business. :-)

!m *

[chadwhitacre]

Let's build a business based on sharing because we want to live in a world in which businesses based on sharing exist.

Let's build a business based on sharing because we want to share.

[chadwhitacre]

Sharing is fun.

[chadwhitacre]

🌝

[chadwhitacre]

Draft: "Hard at Work." Trying to get that out the door here before I disappear for 10 days ...

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! I added a final paragraph with some interesting numbers on contributor community vitality since the Gratipocalypse. We're doin' alright, people. :-)

!m *

Heading out to work with @timothyfcook for the day, then off to PyOhio (#297) tonight!

[chadwhitacre]

I plan to review and publish "Hard at Work" later today.

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the scripts I used to produce those numbers.

[kzisme]

!m @whit537 Awesome post! It makes me happy to be (sort of) a part of Gratipay 😸 Sorry for not being active lately, I've been busy with other things unfortunately.

Did you write those scripts as well?

I wish I could make it to PyOhio, but I have other obligations. How much would I have to pay you for a t-shirt or something 😛 (I didn't see an online shop or something)

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks, @kzisme! We'll miss you at PyOhio. Next year! 💃

I think shirts are $20 or something. What size should I get for you? 👕

"Hard at Work" is up.

[chadwhitacre]

(@kzisme And yes, I wrote those scripts. :)

[kzisme]

@whit537 Large works for me!

Nice work :)

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme Wilco! 💃

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)