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9th ShipIt Day at Six Feet Up is Complete

At Six Feet Up we like to hold a ShipIt Day every quarter.  We truly believe in what Atlassian started and use it as a great way to foster creativity, have fun, and let our team members focus on a project that they are passionate about. We also like to try out different spaces and get out of our office every now and then. This ShipIt day was held Jan. 17-18th 2013 at Launch Fishers, a new co-working space in Fishers, Indiana.

Everyone came out of ShipIt Day really energized and excited about each other's projects. In 24 hours we have made some great improvements and explored new ideas that would never be considered if we didn't clear our schedules periodically. Below is a summary of each team and what they worked on during the day.

ShipIt Day Projects

Team GitUp

This team moved Six Feet Up packages from SVN to the collective (GitHub), including packages such as collective.easyslideshow, collective.blog.feedburner, sixfeetup.worflow.chained, sixfeetup.workflow.featured, sixfeetup.utils etc. This makes it easier for developers in the community to see the work we've done, submit issues and submit pull requests to improve them.

Team Grab Bag

Grab Bag was a project full of Michelle's personal development interests related to communicating with clients and internally. She developed a personal blog editorial calendar and looked into insights derived from taking the DISC Personality Assessment. She came up with blog ideas and a personal blog post, news article, and case study plan for 2013. Michelle also created a weekly inspirational video strategy as part of internal communication.

Team Mobile App Setup for Conferences

On this team we had a few of our developers help Lauren learn how to edit a mobile app and insert content into the app framework from her laptop. The resulting app allows end users to access information for an upcoming conference's speakers, sessions, sponsors, and tweets.

Team Rule DNS

This team created a DNS control panel app based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy to manage DNS zones, Xen virtual machines, and ZFS storage provisioning. Calvin tried out Twitter Bootstrap as well which helped make a quick and clean interface. Luke and Calvin also spent a lot of time helping out some of the other teams.

Team Template

Nolan worked on making it easier to make Pyramid apps faster. We now have templates for Pyramid apps that are standalone as well as updates to existing Pyramid apps that use ZODB, SQLAlchemy, or no pre-defined storage.

Team TimeFreq

The team identified strategic events for Six Feet Up to attend in 2013. The group also developed Event and Project Timelines as well as an Editorial Calendar to coordinate activities leading to an event and scheduled past an event. A news queue was put together with a list of news items, blog posts and case studies to write and publish on the Six Feet Up website. Finally, the team developed a plan to validate assumptions regarding our strategy for 2013.

Team Todo - SHIPIT DAY WINNER

The team worked on a replacement for the current master Trac instance that we use to schedule and coordinate work. Lucie got the project organized and entered tickets for each task we wanted to accomplish.  David hooked up LDAP authentication and implemented the user preferences panel. Chrissy implemented the design using Twitter bootstrap. The team won $200 to a charity of their choice! One of the our Sixies, Chrissy, and her husband started the Imago Dei Church in New Hampshire, which the team selected as their charity.

Next ShipIt Day May 9-10th, 2013:

Our next ShipIt Day will be May 9-10th in the Indianapolis area. As Always Six Feet Up will be opening its doors to any third-party participants or observers interested in deploying the ShipIt Day concept in their own organizations as a way to promote healthy and effective employee motivation practices. For more information, please contact info-AT-sixfeetup-DOT-com.


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