[thesite] RE: [Admin] Codefest 2 wrapup.

[A. Erickson]

You guys fucking rock!

I'll help debug. You got a deadline on that?

- amanda

> -----Original Message-----
> From: admin-admin at lists.evolt.org [mailto:admin-admin at lists.evolt.org]On
> Behalf Of Daniel J. Cody
> Sent: Monday, November 20, 2000 11:03 AM
> To: admin at lists.evolt.org; thesite at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: [Admin] Codefest 2 wrapup.
> 
> 
> Quickie wrapup to get everyone up to speed..
> 
> Friday night we got back to oshkosh(after dan pulled another idiot move 
> of leaving his mobile phone at the airport(one hour diversion ensues)), 
> kinda sat around for a bit, caught up with eachother.. Rudy came bearing 
> liquor and find canadian maple syrup.
> 
> Lacking pancakes, rudy cracked a bottle of jamacian rum. I asked him 
> what he wanted to mix it with and he responded, "Ice". heh.
> 
> Rudy proceeded to get sauced before we even got to the bar, where jeff 
> and i proceeded to get sauced while rudy, coming down at this point, 
> switched to water :) Jen stopped in to say hi and had a couple beers 
> with us too. Saturday, we got to work at the early(we didnt get started 
> at codefest 1 till about 5pm on saturday due to hangovers, etc.) 1pm, 
> and proceeded to put together a to do list, based on shit from the TTLD 
> list, which 'Nuh kept for us.
> 
> First thing on the TDL was change all LONG datatypes in the DB to CLOB's 
> so we could search and do cool shit with them. This proceeded to kick 
> our collective ass'es for about two hours at which point we decided to 
> move onto something that we could actually make progress on. Jeff and I 
> started with the conversion to the SSURLS(Super Sexy URL Scheme), 
> basically rewriting the URL scheme we put in place at codefest 1. Rudy 
> went to work on cleaning up the DB's and getting them to the point where 
> we could merge our test database(which has shitloads of new and improved 
> features, better structure, etc) with our production one. This turned 
> out to be not a small task as well.
> 
> <insert lots of "FUCKING SHIT!'s", "WTF DID I JUST DO?!?", "Uhhh's", 
> "Hey, thats pretty cool's", head scratching, "OOPS's", "Hey guys, I just 
> wiped our production database!", dry eyes, and coding here>
> 
> About 11pm Jen showed up, ready to take us out, and about 12pm we got to 
> the bar, had a couple drinks, talked, smoked, and went to bed. Jeff 
> stayed up while we were all sleeping on my PC and kept coding shit in 
> till 4am.
> 
> At 10am  we awoke to snow and went back to work. I found out that a 
> sports car really doesn't handle for a shit in snow, and pondered if i'd 
> ever see my z3 or girlfriend again as both took off to milwaukee, 
> leaving 3 computer geeks, a dodge spirit, a fucked database, and 4 hours 
> to get to the airport 90 minutes away.
> 
> We got a couple things done but started sweating when the DB wasn't 
> fixed by 1:45(rudy's plane leaving at 3:30) and we still had 90 minutes 
> of driving on shitty roads to do. Thankefully everything appeared to 
> work(Dan: "We forgot to dump the sequences before the import!" Rudy: 
> "Well lets hope *that* doesn't fuck something up" naturally, not dumping 
> the sequences being the one true thing that could fuck up the DB.. heh)
> 
> After an intensive 90 second check to make sure we still had data 
> integrity and that shit, for the most part, still worked, we bailed the 
> fuck outa' dodge in a mad rush to get Rudy's plane before it left for 
> the Great White North without him. Apparently, we made it before his 
> plane did.(grr)
> 
> So, what did we get done?
> 
> - SSURLS which will draw lots and lots of spiders in to index our site.
> - made some progress on the 'members' pages
> - cleaned up the DB a ton, and synched out new DB Structure/data with 
> the old one(both test.evolt.org and evolt.org are pulling of the same DB 
> now, which is nice)
> - config'd it so you don't need cookies enabled to do a lot of shit.
> - made a *lot* of performance fixes. The new site really flies, from an 
> application level.
> - fixed the grr'bot mostly(jeff?)
> - took out old centers
> - added new centers(Usability and Web Business)(someone should probably 
> write something up on the site about these new centers and what 
> they're for)
> - got all admin shit working(as far as adding/editing/approving/deleting 
> articles)
> - umm. i'm sure there's more, having a hard time thinking off all these 
> things right now.
> 
> Things we *didnt* get done?
> 
> - User defined style sheets(didnt even touch it)
> - member pages(partly)
> - convert LONG -> CLOB's
> - converting the Old URL's into New URL's(for people that have specific 
> articles bookmarked, etc)
> - lots of other shit i can't think of.
> 
> Things that we *need* to get done?(We've decided that we may not have 
> all new features totally implemented by the 14th of Dec, so we're going 
> to cut the fat and go live with what we can, adding the things we can't 
> get done as we get them done)
> 
> - Convert old url -> new url(this is my job in the next couple days)
> - convert long -> clob(my job as well)
> - Rudy and Seth need to rap about thetips DB strucutre(thats up 
> to you two)
> - Fix a lot of smaller, annoying bugs.
> 
> So, jeff is going to be busy with work as soon as he gets back. I'm 
> going to be working on the above two items. We could 
> *REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEALY* use some help finding, 
> identifying and documenting bugs on the new site. If we don't have to 
> find them and shit, we can spend the time fixing them.
> 
> There are 60+ people on thesite list, so if everyone of you could find 
> just *one* bug, we could have all the problems identified and then get 
> to fixing them. This is pretty important, and I'm asking for everyones 
> help :)
> 
> So, to sum up, start testing that new site! Let us know what needs to be 
> fixed/addressed by sending an email to thesite at lists.evolt.org with 
> [bug] in the Subject field. I've got a special filter set up to filter 
> them into a bug folder so i can fix them faster.
> 
> So hammer the smurf out of http://test.evolt.org - try everything you 
> can think of to break it, and let us know when you do. Don't worry about 
> fucking up the DB somehow as we're back on the test one again for 
> testing purposes. Let me know if anyone has questions or comments or 
> anything like that..
> 
> Thanks bunches :)
> 
> .djc.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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