Tag: ShipIt Day

In November, our Tampere office organised Ambientia’s 11th ShipIt Day. Colleagues from our Turku office joined the event as well. Because we were familiar with the event formula from past experience, we only needed one preparation session to select the ShipIt Day projects. When work began, the following projects emerged:

• Clustering support for a substantial Grails project
• RPM packaging for Magento Enterprise Edition
• GitHub Page implementation to our internal network via Jekyll
• New Jira and Confluence Conference site with a Brikit theming add-on
• New UI for the server list software that we are using to report and modify virtual machine properties
• Improved toolbox for UX concept work
• Splunk JavaScript API demonstration
• Splunk integration to the server list
• New UI and implementation for the blog this text first appeared in

Failures and Successes

Most of our previous ShipIt Day projects were successfully completed. This time, however, we encountered real shortcomings. The reasons for these failures were evident to experienced IT professionals: specific licences were not delivered, causing projects to be delayed, and the work required to accomplish enterprise-software packaging was grossly miscalculated. Fortunately, we learned much from these mistakes—that is, after all, one of the leading objectives of ShipIt Day.

Actual Work

On Thursday morning, the day began as a typical ShipIt Day. There were concentrated programmers and occasional talks, but there was nothing of interest to report—just coding. By Thursday night, the programmers’ excitement had grown; kids didn’t need to be picked up from day-care, and wives gave their men permission to code late into the evening. The programmers consumed their food quickly, treating it as necessary fuel for the coding work. A couple of the programmers remained at work almost until midnight but still reappeared at the office quite early the next morning. When the projects were presented, two failed, but the others were evidence of real achievements.

Billable ShipIt Day Time

This ShipIt Day had an interesting twist! A couple of our developers had informed our clients about ShipIt Day and the ideas they were going to experiment with. The clients thought found the ideas so valuable, they allowed the programmers’ time to be billed to their accounts. Now that is a development partnership—the Ambientia’s private investment in ShipIt Day was partially covered by the clients! I did not influence the discussions in any way; the developers and clients reached the decision on their own.

The Winner

We again held a company-wide vote to determine who had presented the most outstanding project. The results were clear: Jarkko and Konsta’s new layout for this blog received most of the votes.

Conclusion

Again, ShipIt Day XI was worth all the effort and time. We learned plenty, and we were able to experiment with the many ideas that had been floating in the backs of our minds. Therefore, we plan to organise at least three ShipIt Days for 2014, which I am confident will yield similarly successful results.

The eighth FedEx Day at Ambientia was a successfully orchestrated exercise in team integration. Our UX team in Turku may be quite small in number, but it’s definitely not small either in experience or in ego size. We have also got a talented programming team in Joensuu. – Therefore, we decided to import the guys from Ambientia´s Turku office over to Ambientia´s Joensuu office to let the two groups blend together.

The team from Turku started their day with quite a long train trip from the west coast to Joensuu. The teams have done a lot of remote work together, but on this occasion, it was time for them to share the same hot, sweaty office space and collaborate on ideas face to face…

The Turkuboende and their Macs on the move

One of the principles of a FedEx Day is that the team members are able to choose with whom they’d like to work. The guys from the different sites blended quite naturally into FedEx Day teams. One of the groups that were formed contained UX developers from both sites; that team was enhanced with programmers from Joensuu. At least one of the FedEx Day goals was apparently accomplished.

The output from Ambientia´s FedEx Day VIII contained the following projects:

• A Model Logger Portlet with which to log and compare changes in a Liferay model
• A layout for the Ultimate Functional Training Challenge site, to be announced later
• An awesome ESB Tool script to add queues and services as one-liners to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
• The concepting and implementation of an Awareness Feed to Ambientia’s upcoming website
• The translation of XMLPortletFactory into Finnish and the contribution of the language files to the community and to our Liferay template
• A new extremely simple Web Content Portlet

Lauri in action doing his FedEx Day presentation.

It is Midsummer’s Eve now in Finland and working life halts for a long weekend. I will leave the vote for the winner of FedEx Day VIII open on our Confluence and ditch IT stuff in favour of a bonfire. Thanks, guys! It was an excellent learning experience once again. Have a happy Juhannus!

Ambientia’s sixth FedEx Day took place at the Hämeenlinna site again. Two teams invented ideas which they had hacked together. Most of the participants were already seasoned FedEx Day gurus because they had participated in at least a couple of these events before. This time, we also have three interns working with us at the Hämeenlinna office. The interns got the chance to code with us at the event as well. As far as I’m concerned, participation in a FedEx Day is a great way to learn from more experienced programmers.

More teamwork

At the earlier FedEx Day sessions, the participants mostly were mostly engaged in solo efforts,”i.e. worked on individual efforts. They invented, coded and presented their work by themselves, on their own, rather than in teams. Now the structure is different. We basically have one relatively simple library application that will have three different interfaces: one for Android devices; one with Phonegap for multiple platforms; and one for the Web. In light of the intertwined nature of these projects, the guys felt it would be more conducive to creativity to assemble three teams all involved in related work. The idea of teamwork here makes excellent sense to me. After all, one of the original points/intentions of a FedEx Day was to allow the participants to select the most synergistically dynamic combination of teammates.

The projects of this 6th FedEx Day session were:

• Using KML files with Google Maps in Liferay
• Simple book reservation application as a Proof of Concept of the Play Framework
• Mobile interface to the POC with Phonegap.
• Ambientia’s Sonar environment tweaking
• Kanban board development
• Responsive design for a web site

Skippers

This time, there were a couple of developers who wanted to skip the intensity of the FedEx Day exercises to devote their creativity to current work projects. I totally understand that rationale because, frankly, it is a godsend sometimes when a meeting gets cancelled. And indeed, this whole issue of how time is best spent emerged as one of the key topics covered at Ambientia’s 6th FedEx Day. In conclusion, at this event, the time was well spent for Ambientia staff whether they chose to strengthen their skills and inspire creativity in the workplace, or whether they decided more practically to address the real-life needs of our customers.

The Winner

The winning team was evident. The guys that worked with the simple book reservation application and PhoneGap got about 45 % of the votes. Therefore, they were awarded more project time to complete the work.

Thanks to all of the participants for the great work you did!

Annelise Cappy from Atlassian interviewed me to their blog about Ambientia’s ShipIt Days. It is a story how we have been trying to motivate people and reinvigorate the working environment at Ambientia. The interview quite well summarises the idea and the current situation.

You can read the whole interview from Atlassian’s blog at https://www.atlassian.com/blog/archives/case-study-ambientia-galvanizes-employees-shipit-day

 

 

 

 

Ambientia has five offices in Finland and one in Sweden and also a couple people working from their homes. Because of the distributed nature of Ambientia’s offices, we have decided to do FedEx Days one office at a time. This is new territory now! It was the very first time we organised a FedEx Day at our Joensuu office. It was the fifth time Ambientia was arranged a FedEx Day…

The significant projects the team in Joensuu has been based on Liferay for a while now. Therefore, it was quite natural that most of the ideas were related to Liferay also. Only one project associated with JBoss SOA Platform was able to resist the Liferay dominance. The developers at Joensuu are quite experienced. Therefore, the ideas were also reasonably advanced.

The projects were:

• Liferay, Adding code generation scripts to Liferay development environment
• Liferay, Improve Liferay’s Image Gallery to match Ambientia Content Manager’s features
• JBoss SOA Platform, Expose monitoring interfaces to BaseN Platform
• Liferay, Extending Alloy UI Tag library
• Liferay, Templates Based on Responsive Design Principles

During the evening I saw really concentrated programmers focusing on their code. The guys even refused to eat away from the computers to maintain flow state. To me, that was a prime sign of dedication and one of the points of FedEx Days! Excellent!

The picture below is a bit shaky and stirred but I wanted to include it because it shows quite well the feeling during the FedEx Day presentations Friday:

Everybody at Ambientia can vote for the FedEx Day Winner via an online form. The Winner was evident because about one-third of the votes vent to Laura who did the Responsive Design Templates. Laura received a bottle of Bollinger and loads of fame about her work. See, it is easy to smile when posing as a winner:

I wrote about the problems with FedEx Days around the second day we had over here. The issue has given me a lot of thought. I have been trying to device different rules and guidelines that would drive the benefits of our people and also benefits of the company. It seems that the solution is utmost simple. When people were thinking about the stuff they want to do during the FedEx Days I just asked if the ideas would be “something that Ambientia might be able to sell or benefit in future”. To me, it does not sound a too limiting rule…

Ideas for the next FedEx Day

Tomorrow is the next FedEx Day here. Here are some of the great ideas the guys are going to hack with.

• An iOS app that connects to a content provider
• A Jira archiving spike
• An Instant messenger integration for Jira
• An experimental Vaadin application

To me, it seems that the company’s and employees’ interest is well aligned with the above ideas. Excellent!

Three years in the dark

Eric suggested that he could work with a Jira archiving spike. He boasted how every client we have would be screaming to buy a license for such. He also said that he had had the idea for three years. Imagine, he had had the idea for three years! I was really astonished that we had never discussed the idea before. Still, it is hard for me to believe that we have had this limiting environment for new ideas.

Here is Eric full of energy explaining the four T’s of freedom during a FedEx Day:

Eric explains four T’s

Again, I am eager to see what the guys can deliver during a day of blatant hacking. Have fun!