Seek Nuance

My team has an opening for a QA Lead & Release Manager, for our Plone project. Here’s an excerpt from the full job description:

Location: Seattle, WA
Reports to: Director, Web Development

Fisher Interactive Network is a new division within Fisher Communications, and we need your help in changing the face of web news and information delivery!

This position is a founding member of FIN’s web development team. We’re using open-source technology to improve our sites’ sophistication and relevancy, and create new kinds of news and content delivery. We’ll need you to institute enlightened QA and code release practices. And help build this team’s culture.

The responsibilities will be to lead the QA effort, and own the release procedures used for build propagation. We’re seeking someone with experience in QA, but not necessarily in release management, because the latter can easily learned. We’re looking for experience in open source testing frameworks for web applications, and in Python, because it anchors our technology stack.

SPECIFIC DUTIES:
(Included but not limited to)

• Responsibility for all Quality Assurance, and our test strategy’s overall integrity. This includes developing and overseeing our software test plans and validation procedures
• Drive automated testing within the team. This includes selecting and managing automated test framework(s)
• Be the primary liaison to the Operations Manager, and jointly manage the QA-Production boundary
• Create and maintain functional tests; mostly automated, but also some manual testing. Review the test results for code coverage and regressions, and recommend corrective action

QUALIFICATIONS:

• At least five years experience in software QA, and a strong appreciation and understanding of effective QA processes
• xperience with open-source environments and tools, especially automated testing frameworks and technologies
• At least three years experience with Linux and OS X. At least three years Python experience, or four years with another scripting language coupled with a strong willingness to learn Python
• A healthy engagement with the industry and your trade. E.g., staying current with evolving and emerging technologies
• A healthy respect for agile development processes, continuous integration, QA, and release procedures

Contact me if you’re interested. My e-mail address is john @ this site’s domain.

In 2009, I want to…

Become more familiar with Plone and Zope. Heretofore, I’ve read, experimented, attended a Bootcamp, and attended a conference. I now want to become nuts-and-bolts familiar with them, so that I intuitively understand their internals. (Well, OK, so that I start to intuitively understand their internals.) This will come from touching many areas, rather than diving into just one or two.

Blog about my company’s Plone work. This won’t be easy. Some activities are confidential, some are not confidential but are sensitive, and some are OK to write about. A too-vague problem description is worthless, so, when should I publish something watered-down vs. just not write?

Contribute to Emacs (imminently), and Plone’s Documentation and Evangelism teams (it’ll be mid-year before I can do that).

Maintain a good balance between working on my team’s most important project (which is in Plone), and being a strategic resource for my division. I’ve hewed to being more hands-on here than in my most recent jobs, and I think I’ve been happier as a result. I could easily redefine my job as being more strategic thinking and advanced development, but I don’t want to. What I’m doing now is just as good for my company, and it’s good for my career. I must devote some energy to internal corporate technical advocacy and communications, but accomplishing concrete technical objectives is much more enjoyable. The pithy summation is, I’m happiest when I spend my day in Emacs and a terminal window, but I’m being paid to do “more” than that, so I’ve got to maintain a good balance. (If I sound like I haven’t figured this out yet, it’s because I haven’t.)

Build a great development team at work. Can I do that without being 100% management? I hope so. In the past, team building has been a source of tremendous personal achievement for me — I enjoyed being a forward deflector shield, and seeing them accomplish fantastic things.  But I’ve done that while operating entirely in “management mode.” Does this sound a bit contradictory with my previous goal? Yes. (IISLIHFTOY, IBIH.)

Normalize my family’s money situation. The TrenchMice years inflicted some, shall we say, disturbances to our finances. Regaining a steady income has, of course, helped, but some high-order TrenchMice harmonics are still rippling through our financial ether. I want to tamp them down within the next two months.

Lose 15 lbs.

I did a little searching and found some relevant posts on this question.

The plural of CMS is CMSs. The possessive plural is CMSs’.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

The Seattle Plone Gathering‘s World Plone Day event seemed to be successful. They had about 40 people, which, from what I could see, was a capacity crowd.

I brought five people from my company, and also forwarded the invitation to Joe, who attended and gave it a +1. Afterward, he, Jesse Snyder, and I had dinner at The Triple Door.

Both talks were good, and there was a decent amount of audience Q&A. Jon Stahl’s introduction-to-Plone talk was well received, but I thought it started off a bit too cerebral. It was based on Constance Wilde‘s World Plone Day Slide Deck. It hit all the right points, and of course Jon has a sure command of the subject matter. But the deck began ticking off facts with its second slide: Plone won an award, is OSS, is covered by the GPL, has a 501c(3) foundation, is XHTML and CSS standards compliant, supports OpenID, had only N security problems in the past two years, etc…

IMHO, this presentation opening could be better. Read more…

Ian Bicking just wrote a Cracker Jack post on the direction he’d prefer for Plone’s development. It and its comment thread are great reading.

Money quotes:

One of the ongoing concerns in the Plone community has been the difficulty of attracting and maintaining developer interest in the community, and generally making Plone easier to work with as a developer. It’s been a very successful community for consulting and integration work, but it has not been as rewarding for developers.

Five didn’t remove any complexity, it only added to it. Even if the new components were superior that doesn’t make themsimple. Plone is aching for more simplicity, not more power.

Zope 2 is a behemoth, and its metaphors are deeply intertwined with existing code. Acquisition in particular is ubiquitous, essential to lots of the machinery, and deeply confusing.

Grok…attempts to make development in that environment more pleasing. It eliminates most ZCML (ZCML is Zope 3’s XML-based language for declaring the relation of various components in a system). Grok uses conventions and introspection to make Zope 3 look more like a traditional web framework, with simple views and models and templates, and less of the wiring you have to set up in typical Zope 3 architectures. 

…Plone shouldn’t be so focused on managing the complexity of its stack, but focus on reducing that complexity. And it should reduce that complexity by focusing on content management and moving all the other pieces people have built on Plone out of Plone.

Sure, the customizability is “powerful,” but I don’t hear people clamoring for power. They want simple, predictable, fast, maintainable.

So, I offer this as my suggestion to Plone. I think Plone-the-community has the opportunity to be more than Plone-the-software; I think it must do this to remain viable in the long term. But to get there the community make some choices — you can’t add simplicity.

This is great, informative reading. Check it out.

November 7 is World Plone Day. In Seattle, the Seattle Plone Gathering will host a Seattle WPD event at ONE/Northwest.

There will be presentations/talks about Plone, smart people mixing it up, free Google swag, food, drink, and general intellectual debauchery. The Seattle WPD page has the details, and a link for RSVPing.

If you want to learn about Plone, or just make more connections in the local Plone community, this would be a great way to do it. I’m bringing five people from my company.

One of Plone’s advertised support venues is the #plone IRC channel.

I’ve never been very comfortable with IRC. I’ve always felt odd jumping into the middle of a bunch of conversation threads. IRCing at OSCON was fun, but that was a snark-fest.

But, yesterday I took the plunge. I asked a question, and Veda Williams provided the answer. It was easy. I’m sold. Now I have Colloquy open on #plone all the time, and glance at it occasionally.

My reflections on my first Plone conference…

Things that were great

The conference, in whole. The organizers did a great job, and we should all contribute to pay off their mortgages. 

I’m sometimes a bit jaundiced about the overused word, “community,” but the Plone/Zope community is aces.

Things that weren’t great

The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center sucked. It’s cold, bland, and too big.

The Reagan building’s Wi-Fi sucked, sucked, sucked. It’s beyond me how the largest building in Washington, D.C, with 3.1MM square feet, could be overwhelmed by the network activity of a 310 person conference.

I would have paid $40 more in registration fees for slightly more interesting lunches. Read more…

ZCML, CSS hooks, portlets, viewlets, GenericSetup, customization tricks, and I18N.

I sat in the front row, and my DVR, using the ECM-DS30P, made good recordings of the instructor’s voice. But boy, the ECM-DS30P does quickly drain the battery. A fresh AAA battery lasts about five hours when I use the best recording quality.

Jon Stahl shaved off his beard, and the free bootcamp Wi-Fi was much better today. Any causality between these two facts, in either direction, would rate an 8.5 on the oddness meter.

I saw rope lines set up outside the Hard Rock Cafe. Rope lines for a Hard Rock Cafe?

Today was ZPT, TTW philosophy, portal_view_customizations vs. portal_skins, viewlets, and simple customizations. Joel Burton is an excellent instructor.

The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center sucks. Many D.C. buildings are huge, but the Reagan building outsizes almost all of them. It’s so large that I found it uncomfortable and disorienting. And sterile, bland, and cold (cold as in feeling, not air temperature). Walking around it during our breaks was depressing. Wi-Fi within it costs $13/day, which is insane! Its only positive attribute was that building security wasn’t onerous — they let you keep your laptop in the bag, and your jacket & shoes on.

A janitor threw out my nifty DVR stand during a break. Sigh. I found a nearby Starbucks, so I’ll make a new one tomorrow morning.

To those of you staying at Hotel Harrington for the Plone 2008 conference: Its Wi-Fi rocks! At least, on the third floor, in the vicinity of room 316, on a Sunday.

I’m seeing a 1Mbps download speed.