Category: Uncategorized

Looking out for your clients, long and short term

Over the years of working in software development I have come to realise that it is as important to look after your clients long term needs as it is their short term needs. It is something that is easily overlooked when you are in the throes of resolving issues that impact the client right here and now. But it is important that an equal amount of energy is spent on long term wellbeing as on getting the short term results.

In software engineering there is a concept called ‘Technical Debt’ it basically boils down to making choices that win you something in the short term, but you end up paying for in years to come. When working on a free software project this concept is still applicable, but an added dimension comes into play … lets call it ‘Social Debt’. There are often times you can make a decision that may afford you a short term gain, but may detrimentally impact the relationships with other members of the project. I posit that while Technical Debt is bad for the project as a whole, Social Debt usually hurts the debtor far more than the project. It is also far harder to recover from than Technical Debt.

Therefore I think it is in the best interests of any developers clients, that the developer takes care to not only make decisions that cause minimal Technical Debt, but also ones that cause minimal Social Debt.

Some libraries to thank

In the course of looking through the PTFS public repository with an eye to integrating the code into koha, I thought it would be nice to pull out a list of the libraries who had sponsored the code.

Apologies to anyone I have missed, and corrections accepted.

  • East Brunswick Public Library, East Brunswick, NJ, USA
  • Middletown Township Public Library, Middletown, NJ, USA
  • Plano Independent School district
  • George Washington’s Estate and Gardens (Mount Vernon) Library and Gunston Hall Library & Archives, Virginia.
  • Arcadia University.

So a big thanks to all these libraries.

Code hits the wild

PTFS have just made a lot of previously unreleased code available in their public repository

http://github.com/ptfs/Koha-PTFS

This includes the just released ‘Harley’ branch. It’s great to see the code seeing the light of day, and now the release management team will have the fun job of integrating it for 3.4.0.  🙂

Congratulations to the people at PTFS who worked hard to get this code written  and released, and I’m sure there will be many an hour spent discussing how best to integrate it into mainstream now.

I have cloned the harley branch and pushed to both my home and work repositories.

UPDATE

Thanks to the awesome Galen Charlton (current Koha release manager) we now have a wiki page tracking integration of the code into mainstream.

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/PTFSHarleyIntegration

UPDATE 2

Some great clarification on Koha releases.

Unsung Koha heroes – Part 17

Pat Eyler

Us old timers will remember Pat well, but the newer members of the community will not have had the opportunity to meet him. Pat was the first Koha Kaitiaki, and did a huge amount to promote Koha and to foster a strong community. Pat first became involved in Koha in April 2002, and became the 8th person to commit code to Koha. In May 2002 Pat was elected Kaitiaki, some of the neat things he did in that role were

  • A monthly newsletter, which Nicole has now resurrected
  • Wrote and had published a 3 page article on Koha for the linux journal, published both online and in print.
  • Was first point of contact for press
  • Wrote the first scripts to allow koha to create RSS feeds
  • Hung out on irc answering hundreds of questions.

There is little doubt in my mind, that without Pat Koha would not have made such inroads in the US. I know that Pat spent quite a bit of time talking with Stephen Hedges when Athens County Public libraries were first looking at Koha.

Pat thank you for all the work you put in. We think of you often

Setting the record straight

I’ve been thinking for a while about the right way to clear up some rumours that were unceremoniously spread about me over the years. Rumours that I just let be for various personal and professional reasons. I think that now that the sale of Liblime to PTFS has been finalised it’s the right time to make just a few things clear.

My clarification is short and sweet – and long overdue. Contrary to what has been said over the last few years, I was not fired from Liblime – in fact I have never been fired from any job in my life. I resigned from LibLime simply because I felt that was what was best for the project and for my family.