Ripple Hackathon - Day 3

I started writing this last night, but just got time to publish it.

The Ripple Hackathon has finished! Today felt even more on-focus than yesterday, but also less frantic/stressed. We were in “the zone” for sure. Here’s what we accomplished today:

• Duff finished off the “stored key” associations, including incorporating conflict resolution on them! (I’ll be writing up a discussion of the new conflict resolution API later.) He also fixed a small inconsistency in an internal API around associations.
• Nathaniel teased apart some specs that were invoking save or create on Document models but weren’t in the integration suite, and he also lent me a lot of help on improving the build on Travis.
• Myron implemented an awesome decoupled serialization API for Riak::RObject. You can now register your own serializers for Ruby objects that you assign to the data on a RObject. So if you want to implement a custom serialization routine for application/x-my-content-type, you can do it now.
• Kyle continued work on refactoring the Riak::Client code so that you can specify multiple hosts among which to multiplex requests at runtime. This will include configurable load-balancing strategies (starting with a default round-robin strategy).
• I reviewed a number of works-in-progress from the other developers but spent most of my time bringing our Travis build toward green. There are still some outstanding runtime/build environment/worker-related issues on Travis, but in the last few builds we’ve had at least one Ruby version passing in the build.

Retrospective

This was a phenomenal week; I can tell because we kept a kanban on one of the whiteboards and the list in the “Done” column grew quite long in the three days (or you can just look at the commit list and changes). More than just the things completed, I believe we developed a rapport and understanding that can only be done in-person. We also have a clearer way forward, and some momentum behind key features that have been waiting to be started.

Thanks to all the committers who attended, and a very special thanks to the people at Basho who helped make this happen:

• Mark wrote the proposal and finances for the event, handled ordering lunch each day, and took notes and pictures of the event.
• Maureen, our office manager, handled booking hotels and other necessary logistics on very short notice.
• Marisa, our VP Finance, ran the numbers faster than should be humanly possible to meet accelerated timeframe.
• John and Justin let me take 3 days off the normal schedule to come to San Francisco and run this.
• Tony made everyone feel welcome and arranged an awesome dinner on Tuesday.

Comments