Gathering requirements

So, in a closed development process,  the main (and only?) source of information would be the customer. Perhaps with a little bit of work on our side to see how that can be reused, and even with more than one customer been queried about their opinion.

In this case, the result has to be good and useful for the community, so I am opening an open wiki:

https://sites.google.com/site/chargethecloud/

You are invited to participate, comment, and enhance it... I will be reviewing comments and requests for enhancements to the content.

Let's make this a real solution, with a clear definition of what is needed and the priorities of it.

A thought on internships and Open Source

I often wonder what would be the best outcome of an internship - for every one, the company, the intern, even society. I as an intern myself for most of the years of my studies - something not quite normal in Spain - and as a result I want to make sure that everybody gets something out of this.

Being an intern is good - for me was quite an experience - because you really start looking at the world from a different perspective. In my time that didn't mean too much, I was just cheap workforce, but nevertheless I came to see things from a different perspective completely: my colleagues were real workers, and the kind of things they talked about was not what I was used to see and hear with my fellow students.

In this case, this group is different. They are still located in a environment that is still mostly university related, and thus they will have a limitation on the kind of soft skills they will have. That is a pity, but makes things easier for them, as they don't have to be physically in a place, and can adjust their schedules to their studies.

On the other hand, they are involved in an amazing project, I would have loved to have an internship like this. And, more than that, we are making a great effort to have them trained. After this internship, our team should be the first ones to get a job - and I hope that Red Hat and our partners Logicalis and Produban are their first options.

Nonetheless, participating in an open source community makes thing easier to get a job afterwards. Red Hat in fact employees a lot of engineers that starting working in a community in their free time, and finished working in the community under a contract.

So, it is training the solution? I want to make sure that any body that goes through this internship ends up being a better worker in the future, and quite biased to Open Source (and Red Hat). So we are getting them trough the best training we can get.

I believe that is good, it is something that adds value to the internship, students really need to learn a lot after they finish, and we are getting them access to a lot of great people inside the organization to make things even better. Of course they can't have a coffee with them - most of them being in the US (United States), only with me. It is hard to have a coffee with somebody in the US (Universidad de Sevilla) - but they have meetings, video calls, and the contacts to work with them.

Finally, and in any case, pressure is there, this is not coffee brewing, but doing work in a real environment, with quality, a real customer behind, something so good that can  become open source.  Sometimes I hear comments about how this work should not be done with interns... and I wonder if that is something we should say to all those people that are already contributing in their free time to open source: "hey, you don't know enough to do this, go and have some drinks with your fried".

The answer is no, I am convinced that in this group we have some of the future stars of the community. We need to train people to work with Open Source, not just hope that they will for whatever reason that got us here. Having them doing something meaningful, a challenge, having trust in them, is part of the open source way. Of course this will be more difficult for them that going around for three months doing easy tasks that nobody wants to do... but that would be a case of money only.  I often find people that dedicate their careers to do manual things that should be automated, and the reason is the same: it' easier to make it start, it's easier to keep going without finding a new challenge every day... but it's a waste of talent.

Let God help us live up to the expectations. And let's put some value in people's life, just a little bit.

Training

How do you get two interns trained... When you have another one joining on Monday?

Of course, doing the courses you would do in any other case. We really need to make them work full speed as soon as possible if we are going to make them do a good job... And we want them /us to success.

This week Tamara has -almost- also joined the team along with Rafa and Amaury. Coming from a Telco Engineering, she will have a different point of view to our team She will be joining in August, just next day, and happened to pass by and say hello. Produban (The IT of Banco Santander) has decided to collaborate with us giving her an internship that she will be doing with us. So now we have Produban, Logicalis,  and Red Hat working together in this project.

Meanwhile, we have moved into CloudForms training - the downstream project for ManageIQ. The tool is great, but complex. There is so many nuances in it that is convenient to them to do formal training, and that is what we are doing the following next two weeks before holidays, making sure that they do the training a consultant would receive to work on the tool.

Tamara, Rafa, Sergio and Amaury. A winning team

It is also exciting that we have got them to choose a Master and Grade project aligned with this project. Amaury will be devoted to analyze what is the best way to do configuration in a highly complex environment like this, what parts and elements are needed, what options should be available. Tamara will be investigating what are the best options to create Charging Data Records to be exported.

This is being really fun!

Imponderables

So now we are working full speed.

Our two first interns have started learning what is needed, they are finishing a couple of books on Ruby and Rspec, reading some code.
We've talked on Cloud, Virtualization, Open Source, charging...
We've got the hardware prepared, and I am installing it.
We are preparing some courses on ManageIQ/CloudForms

And then the first management problem. We have the opportunity to work with another two interns, but the University has a quite complicated way of doing things... so complex that my time suddenly has been absorbed by petty management things.... like making sure every contract, every detail is worked out.

One never things that the most complex thing in the beginning is going to be administration...

Smile

A great two days talking about the project and discussing next steps in the University of Seville. Still working to get another programmer...
Rafa on the left, Amaury on the right, myself in the middle.

And.... we started

Last week we started.

July 1st, and I couldn't be with the interns... July 2nd, and I was there for a day.
Not enough, tomorrow I will go back again.

So I have a lot of things to think about:
- How do I empower the interns? We are a team, and they need to make decisions, more decisions than myself.
- I need to teach them while I am remote, and I need to learn from them. I can't forget they are the professional in this... I am just learning. The problem is the big list of things to learn

•  What is charging and billing
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• ManageIQ, what is it for
• Open Source...

So we had an interesting meeting where I talked with them about Open Source, charging, a little about the product.... and that is all. This week I expect to show them a demo, see how they are doing, start listening...

At least, we know:
- We are going to be using TravisCI for CI... Trello, Rspec... More things to learn in the real world

Plain English

Just imagine what would happen if you had to select three interns, worked with them, liked a few of them - a lot - and then discovered that you can't choose them....

That was what happened to me last week. I went to the University to select three interns for our development, and I found a group of very good candidates.... that didn't speach English.

I was not asking too much, a good candidate for me what either a very good student, or a student that has been working throughout the university, whatever job, whenever place. There is a lot to learn in McDonalds about how to work in a team that can be very good in the working place. Little knowledge of Ruby / Python, passion for Open Source, willingness to learn, maturity to take decisions were part of the deal, but I could cope with it, and then English, just enough to work in a community where you have to interact.

I am still wondering how that is possible. XXI century, people that are finishing their studies in a technical field, that are used to read books in English, as there is no much literature on computer science that is properly translated... but not enough.

The direction was telling me they try to convince students to study English, and they try, but they don't listen. What kind of jobs are they trying to get? Any high level profile one will start with an English exam, even for jobs where English is seldom used...  My 6 years old has a better accent than most of them.. (yes, I am angry because I could see the potential)

So at the end I have a great candidate that will work with us, and two pending positions for what I will need to start searching again good candidates... This time in the selected group of people that can speak more than one language.

This is being fun, and quite tiresome.