Tea and Cake

Raffe and I had a planning meeting yesterday, he made homemade burgers and I made tea. Hmm burgers and tea with a chocolate royal for desert, not the heights of grastronomic elegance but it filled our tummies ^_^

When it comes to project planning I like to be pragmatic, we’re a team of two and a formal scrum process would be over the top. However the idea of a backlog and sprints/increments/iterations (or whatever you’d like to call them) is fairly well ingrained in my psyche these days and I find it a logical way to plan out a project.

I found a pad of yellow sticky-notes on Raffe’s desk, (buried under a pile of books, scraps of paper and gadgets), and quickly went to work converting the glass-tile window in his apartment into a project planner.



Each vertical column represents two weeks;

The first row at the top has months, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb. The second row holds my tasks; As I am building the web application, from the left we have tagging, basic gallery features, journal etc, planned out till Christmas (our proposed Alpha date).
The third row has milestones and milestone related tasks; in December we have ‘register a company’ and ‘alpha release?’, while at the end of February we have ‘We need a production server!’ and ‘Beta!’
The fourth row contains Raffe’s tasks, he is building the desktop application so from the left you will find: investigate skia, port current app to skia, deferred rendering etc..
And finally..The last column is our high level backlog, grouped up but in no particular order.

If you’re a PM you’re probably cringing in horror right now at our laissez-faire approach to project planning. Yet this works for us, we’re a team of two after all, we’re small enough to be a productive hive-mind.

And I think this is the advantage of small teams, low overhead on just about everything, the ability to think, and to act without weeks of discussion. Our project planning for the next few months literally happened in two hours.. and much of that was making burgers!

Skunkpad is a little project I’m working on with a good friend of mine Raffe. Skunkpad is essentially a sketching/artwork application for use with drawing tablets such as those produced by Wacom.


Some of our planned features include:

• Collaborative drawing with your friends over the internet.
• Online sync of your raw artwork to your ‘studio’, never lose artwork again!
• Online community of artists able to create new communities and sub-communities, create pages for topics of interest and run community forums and events such as art competitions.
• Comprehensive drawing application, user extensible via LUA, community made filters & brushes.
• Multi-gallery publishing form the application, click to publish finished artwork to popular online galleries.

We already have a small dedicated group of Alpha testers who will be testing our first release in the next week or so. Our aim is to release a limited public beta before Christmas and we are working hard to get to that point ^_^

My focus is on the web application, while Raffe is building the desktop app itself (although the entire process is highly collaborative and we bounce ideas off each other all the time). I’ve been a long time fan of twisted, which is an asynchronous networking framework for python. In previous jobs over the years I’ve reveled in building large scale web apps on the twisted platform.

Without wanting to come off as critical of twisted.web and nevow, because I think they have their place, for this project I wanted to try something a bit lighter on its toes with a quicker development cycle, something a little less ..rigid.

As with any geek diving into a new set of tools I am like a kit at Christmas time, bits of paper going everywhere, running about showing everyone what I’ve found *wraps the pocoo developers up in her tail and hugs them to bits*.

The stack I am using, which is proving just about the right level of already-has-that and can-still-do-my-own-thing-without-any-trouble is NGINX, Gunicorn, Werkzeug, WTForms, Jinja2 & SqlAlchemy on Ubuntu Linux.

While I am keen to review several of these in their own right over time, the combination together with the help of a few decorators to register bits and pieces makes for a very neat and simple way to assemble an application. I’m finding myself writing fewer classes and more functions, with classes being relegated to the more appropriate purpose of modeling data structures, rather than defining complex logic.

I think that it is my need for freedom which this little stack of libraries tickles in me, a freedom which has me rushing home after my day job to dive into code all over again.

-Pomke