Recent Experiences - Possible Posts

Over the last year, I've been increasingly doing a lot of blogging the intranet at work. As a consequence of this, I think I've felt less urge for blogging out here.

The same way an open source developer builds a public profile by having their product shared in the open, I think it makes sense for people who don't work on code to do the same in the form of blogging, vlogging, tweeting or writing posts on Twitter/Facebook.

Unfortunately, the content I write on the intranet is very specific to that culture. So it wouldn't be right to copy it in here.

What I can do is to iterate some of the topics just quickly in this post, and then think about what topics are worth writing more about here. Your feedback is appreciated! Write a comment below or tweet me if you want to direct my writing in a particular direction.

What do I do anyway

For context, the last years my role has evolved quite a bit. I have a tricky profile to pin down into a role: I've drifted from software development through infrastructure/operations management, organizational development, and now currently I'm an agile coach for a business unit of development teams.

I like this role because it gives me the freedom to operate where I can have the most impact, in a wide realm between technology and organization.

While it seems everybody has become proficient in running distributed teams the last 3 months, I did get a head-start in this area by starting to work remotely almost 4 years ago.

What have I been writing about (internally)

In no particular order..

A whole bunch of pro-tips about GSuite, Google Calendar, Gmail, IRCcloud, BlueJeans, and so on.
Various exercises for distributed teams (various formats for retrospectives, team building, post-mortems, etc.)
Radiating availability and absence (particularly important in distributed teams)
Planning for operational capacity in globally distributed teams (hint: no single day is a holiday in all the world's countries)
Online meeting survival guide

Some of the more interesting things I've been doing (and could potentially write about)

Coaching a team distributed over 11 countries (with time-zones from California to India)
Gathering said team for a week of co-located team building
Running one of those team weeks in a distributed form (due to COVID19)
Onboarding new-hires into distributed teams (building processes for this and practicing them)
Practicing leadership in distributed teams (do's and don'ts)
Setting up Jira projects for distributed Kanban teams

My inner imposter-syndrome-voice is saying that all these topics have been discussed at length already (I particularly enjoy the perspectives from the Know Your Team blog).

I still hope my writing on any of these topics will add something new to the public body of knowledge. Let me know which ones are more interesting to you!

Comments

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please click here . So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our fetching repo. Set up a bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using git log --graph --...

Git-SVN Mirror for multiple branches

This post is part of a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please click here . This extends the posts where I explained how to set up a git-svn mirror for a single directory. NOTE: If you just want to use Git against a SVN repo on your own, stop reading ,now, and stick to the git-svn basics. However, if you want a setup where you can share a Git repository with colleagues and friends while still interfacing with Subversion, keep reading. I'll show how to set up a git-svn mirror for a standard Subversion project with trunk , branches and tags . It's a bit like the single directory mirror, but in order to keep all branches in sync, it's a bit more fiddling. The good part is that this setup enables us to cherry-pick commits from one branch to the other. This is slightly smoother than using svn merge . First of all, let's repeat how our Subversion and Git-repositories look physically (roughly the sa...

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...

The Dream of a Bi-directional Git-SVN mirror

This post is part of a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please click here . I just got an email asking me how one can set up a bi-directional Git-SVN mirror. It ended up being quite a long answer, so I'll post it here for the benefit of other Git-SVN readers with the same idea. As you may know, I'm a proponent of my own Git-SVN setup . I remember trying to go down the path of a bi-directional repository, but always ran into problems. Here is how it could work: However nice this would be to have, it can be very hard to achieve in practice: Git-svn requires working in a non-bare repository, so pushing to it is by default refused. You can work around this by doing this in the target sync repo: git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore You also have to automatically perform a git reset --hard in the syncing repo after each push (by some git hook?), because the work-dir is c...