In-person team meeting

in-person
meeting
brainstorming
planning
Details and agenda for our in-person team meeting.
Author

Luke W. Johnston

Published

June 12, 2023

Details

  • Lunch with everyone on Tuesday

  • 2-days at SDCA in Forum (rooms in calendar invite)

  • Main aims of meeting:

    • Look through applicants and discuss hiring process.
    • Discuss and decide on how we will work with the consulting company.
    • Discuss and decide on next steps, any potential/current barriers, and misc items.
    • Discuss and brainstorm how we can contribute to work across Steno, for instance helping build software/organization to streamline work, running short workshops, etc.

Schedule

The schedule is meant as a guide only. We might spend more time on some topics and less on others.

Day 1: June 12

Time Item
10:00 Discuss applicants, hiring, and job
12:15 🍴 Lunch
13:30 Discuss how we’ll work with consulting company
16:00 End for day

Day 2: June 13

Time Item
10:00 Discuss next steps and any other items
12:15 🍴 Lunch all together
13:30 Luke’s meeting with company.
14:30 Discuss contributions across Steno
16:00 End for day

Sessions

Job candidates and hiring process

  • Go through candidates, discuss, and send out emails for interviews.

Working with consulting company

  • Details on what our original plan was for consulting company, what they can actually provide and do.
  • Brainstorm what we want the company to do, how we can best use their expertise and time, and how we can coordinate working with them.
  • Plan out priorities to discuss with them for next meeting with them.

Next steps, barriers, and other items

  • General update on progress and bigger picture items.
  • What are some things we need to improve on?
  • Any areas of struggle or barriers to progress?
  • Next steps, areas of focus.
  • Optional tasks:
    • Split up seedcase main project into sub websites? E.g. design, community, learn, etc?
    • Move project over into rostools or create whole new organization? Or stay with SDCA organization?
    • Review several “Discussion” labelled issues on repositories.
    • Brainstorm logo! 😁

Cross-Steno contributions

  • Brainstorm what we can offer and what we can provide
    • For instance, helping build software/organization to streamline work, running short workshops, etc.
  • Create a plan for organizing getting started, mapping out people/roles, coordinating dates for further brainstorming meetings, etc.

Minutes

Interviews and hiring

  • Went through candidates and started process towards interviewing.

Consulting company

  • Areas we’d like help in:
    • Security
    • General/initial setup for best practices
    • General review of design/architecture
  • Ideas on how often to work, when, and for how long? Ultimately depends on our discussion with them during a “introduction/brainstorming” workshop, where we will negotiate and decide on what works best for everyone.
    • Maybe 2 days a week? Tue-Wed?
      • If this weekday setup, we should move meetings to Wed afternoon.
    • Go in 6 months intervals? First phase would be for design and getting set up, second would be focused on security and testing, final maybe focusing on frontend/UI/UX?
    • Should of course be comfortable with English and working remotely.

Next steps

  • Areas of improvements:
    • Code reviews:
      • For bigger PRs, the submitter should schedule time with someone else on the team for a virtual review to go through the PR verbally, so we can move those PRs through sooner.
      • For smaller PRs, a simple visual/asynch review will work fine.
      • For commit messages, have more detailed, descriptive messages, especially emphasizing the why, not just the what. Better yet is to reference an individual issue.
      • Include more documentation on the functions/code created. For external facing code, include a complete docstring. For internal code, write code in a descriptive enough way, supplement with detailed enough comments, with a “top-level” comment describing the basic purpose, type of input, and type of output.
    • Action: Luke will put these into the contributing document.
    • For meetings:
      • Use a template to cover some basic things that each person covers, in 5 minutes or less.
      • Use “scrum standups” as inspiration.
      • Action: Luke will create templates we can follow.
  • Struggles and barriers:
    • What is the general design for the common data model?
    • Using GitHub and Git
      • Potential solution for this is create some workshops on using Git and GitHub. One for the basics and another for use in collaboration settings.
      • Action: Luke will create two new repos on the steno-aarhus account with basic setup for how it will look.
      • Action: Kris will organize times with other Steno people (Julie) on creating these workshops.
  • Misc:
    • Got domain name (seedcase-project.org) as well as a .dk version.
    • Ideas on general theme of websites:
      • A light, soft blue/teal/green colour, to match idea of Seedcase.
      • Colour blind friendly
      • Simple and minimal
    • Ideas on general theme of Seedcase Product UI:
      • Create it so there are some default themes built-in, but that it can be easily customizable with Sass (.scss) or something similar.
    • Logo, Kris started making some with Midjourney app, and made a basic draft of it.
    • To fix on website: Community sidebar is weird and “View source” isn’t on all pages.
    • Splitting up repo contents (for seedcase website), others are neutral to the idea, might be good for admin/organizing though.
    • Seedcase will eventually need involvement of IT department, since we will need a server to host the software.
      • Kris will eventually be responsible for connecting with IT and coordinate things.
      • We can use the experience to inform how to set things up with other IT departments in other organizations.

Steno contributions

  • Start with brainstorming with Kasper on how we can help him out with his tasks
    • Schedule brainstorming session to see what his day actually looks like, so we can identify sources of contribution.
  • Start bringing together people who work on data on the management side (not analysis side).
    • Action: Kris will learn who is doing data management stuff and coordinate bringing them together.
    • Action: Luke will start creating docs describing what we are doing and why we are doing it and how to go about it.
  • Start working more on the project listing/registration module of Seedcase, since others at Steno could benefit from that a lot. Would be a nice “showcase” of what we are doing and how it can help others.
  • Create a survey/form for people across Steno to submit ideas for projects or things we can help with, then we can start working on those one-by-one. And so we can start building up a wait list.
    • Action: Luke will create this and advertise it