What's Bothering us right now

• being blocked about getting things like self serve public because we want a way to deploy things
• DNS, hosting fixes - no one is taking on
• have things to deploy and can't
• overall there's a "things aren't the way we want them to be"
• no one has time to work on things - we all feel this

• It's hard for new hires to learn what's already in place
• What are the systems, how do they work, interrelationships are hard to track down
• Someone who's new to this doesn't have a central picture to predict conflicts on new work

What would help right now?

• sound description of each system (app store is beginning of that)
• tips on how to start the discussion on where to get new work up and running (what db, host, etc)
• process for how we create new systems - and determine the 'ilities': scalability, maintainability, reliability, etc

Suggestions/Questions/Comments

• would it help to be writing down the questions to create the template for what kind of docs/info we need to gather?
• how much of this is inherent in the system? complicated/moving parts/imperfect software & hardware
• one-line patch assumption can turn into a week stuck into something, the 'how long will this take' estimates can be off
• this is endemic to something we've all been picking at
• we can no longer be a loose collection of engineers working on their thing
• because of size of team and scope of problems, we are hitting the communication issue of a larger team
• a single person can no longer just do everything alone
• we need specializations (eg: Dustin is aleady specializing away from master side of buildbot)
• there's a lot of stuff that someone like, for example catlee, knows that is not shared knowledge: how to access db, use talos monitoring
• need technical measures that test/ensure fault tolerance and isolation - e.g., netflix chaos monkey
• someone might send email when a system first come out, but what kind of things do we need to document and make sure are easy to find over time?
• still missing something to get things done
• example for right now: self serve - is deploying it in its current state a mistake?
• we haven't got time/known method for auditing new tool or system to know whether it is ready to be production level

Action items

• looking into scalability of self serve (hosting)
• everyone contribute to docs about the systems we use and how they inter-operate with other tools/systems - ReleaseEngineering/Applications