diff --git a/_posts/2021-10-20-fond-farewell.md b/_posts/2021-10-20-fond-farewell.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..8dd30df560 --- /dev/null +++ b/_posts/2021-10-20-fond-farewell.md @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "2021-07-16: A Fond Farewell For Now to Community Day & Norman" +author: "carabasdaniel" +categories: + - team + - status +tags: +--- + +## IAC Community Day + +### Background + +The Infrastructure Automation Content (IAC) team formed from the merger of 4 core content-focused teams (Modules, Windows, Cloud & Containers, and Networking), +maintaining forty-five open-source supported Puppet modules and over a dozen tools that help reduce the content maintenance and support costs. + +A crucial part of Puppet’s success has always been the support of the community. +The IAC team, like with all module teams before, would have had a dedicated engineer or engineers assigned to community triage, usually on a rotational basis. + +The triage rota consumed 20% of the team's engineering resources. It was challenging due to: + +- Lack of domain knowledge +- Work spilling over either into or out of triage during rotation +- Impact to other team members not on rotation +- Engineers left feeling drained, low self-esteem +- Engineers dreading rotating onto triage. + +### Community Day (Introduced in November 2020) + +Community day came about as part of reviewing of our triaging commitments and chatting with the team listening to their concerns. + +As mentioned, 20% of the team’s engineering resourcing and effort was already going into the triage rotation. So we asked ourselves the question: + +> What if we focused this 20% effort and had the whole team take part in a full day community triage? + +Benefits: + +- Upskilling +- Teamwork +- Reduced distractions +- Greater community focus +- Starting the week off with a win +- Productivity within the team increased (hard to believe even for us, at first) + +Not only have we been able to address the backlog of community requests across forty-five supported open source modules (plus over a dozen tooling repos), the team have been able to focus on feature delivery. + +Since switching to the new community day, over the last eleven months, the team have: + +- Handled† 1536 issues +- Performed 205 module releases +- Released 30 tooling updates + +> † Handled meaning a team member has either: +> +> - Closed a PR or Jira +> - Merged community a PR +> - or provided feedback on a community PR + +By committing to community day and limiting distractions to 1 day, the team have also delivered: + +1. A new Cloud CI + 1. With multi-node testing support + 2. New automated workflow + 3. Internal developer environment support +2. Cisco Network device enhancement +3. New DSC builder generating >300 DSC PowerShell modules uploaded on the forge +4. 3 OS certifications +5. Certified all the supported modules again Puppet 7, including: + 1. Raising and testing fixes for numerous issues in Puppet 7 nightly agent builds prior to release +6. Rolled out the Trusted Contributor program +7. Improved our community communication with a weekly blog post, enhancing our community reporting + +All in all, the IAC community day has not only enabled the team to reconnect with the community, address the content backlog, and upskill across the team; +it has also improved team productivity by reducing distraction and increasing team morale. +Mondays are, at the best of times, a tough day. +Starting a week off with a win? Priceless. + +Sadly, Community Day is coming to an end. +Due to a significant reduction in resourcing, it is no longer possible to provide the technical support needed to run a dedicated community support day. + +The content maintained by the IAC team is still of high importance to Puppet. +Puppet would like to encourage our community to reach out via our public slack channels for assistance. +Our PM team will help prioritize issues raised. + +## Farewell, Norman 💜 + +This week we have to say farewell to Norman, the Engineering Manager of the IAC and DevX Teams. +This is a particularly sad goodbye as many of us, past and present, consider Norman one of the best leaders we have had the privilege of working with. + +In just under three years, Norman led us to some fantastic achievements and kept us motivated and moving forward through turbulent times. +Norman has shown unparalleled dedication to his team’s wellbeing, motivation, and personal development whilst still acting as a clarifying arbiter between the high-level vision and plans of the organisation. +It was a tough balancing act that he seemed to be able to do, with his usual 110% dedication he never falters from. + +Norman motivated and enabled us to become far better engineers and people than we were prior to being taken under his wing. +The remit of the IAC team is a tough one, and one that can often be underappreciated, but Norman always fought our corner and sung our praises to anyone who stood still long enough to listen. +Norman was great at suggesting and soliciting us to suggest new processes / ideas (Community Day being a prime example), that would make us more efficient and motivated, as a team. +We benefited from his wealth of knowledge, experience (both technical and managerial) and genuine care for his colleagues and team. + +We’d like to thank Norman for his hard work and support over these nearly three years. +The IAC and DevX teams owe him a huge gratitude and we’ll miss him, as we bid farewell and good luck in your next venture!