Ongoing Collaborations

Plone Stuff

I work with (and on) a web application server, Zope, and use a content management platform built on Zope, named Plone. I sometimes am involved in fostering the emerging features that i need.

Community Collaboration Tools

Throughout my software development career my efforts have gravitated towards development and application towards tools which support collaboration of one sort or another. Often in addition or in support of my direct customer-answerable duties, i created or advanced the following free software/open source efforts:

• During my leading systems support in the Factory Automation Systems division at NIST (1985 to 1992), i spearheaded a collaboration with neighboring systems support managers to develop and institute a facility for sharing software applications across organizational and systems boundaries, (postscript) the Depot (i've got a local pdf copy of the depot paper).

• While at CNRI (1995 to 1999) i helped create an early umbrella organization for Python developers, the PSA - it has been replaced by a more formal organization, the Python Software Foundation, but served for years as a logistical center for python developers and development. I also initiated and managed the Python programming language public presence - the python.org website, mailing lists, public CVS repository, etc. (All this, i should add, was with the support of CNRI, who authorized part of my work hours for PSA and python.org duties.)

  In the course of doing that i also rescued a languishing python-based mailing list manager Mailman. I developed it from a rough prototype, originally by John Viega, to a widely commissioned production system. I passed it on to other developers when i left CNRI, but i refined it and introduced a number of key features during my tenure that helped it become as popular as it now is, as the GNU mailing list management system. I was primary author and presented a paper about Mailman at the seventh Python conference, in October of 1998, just as it was becoming more widely known and used.

• During my tenure at Zope Corp (1999 to 2004), i developed and maintained key parts of Zope Corporation's and the Zope development communities facilities for public and customer-project collaborative development, including (click on this item's text to show or hide sub-bullets):

  • the Zope/CMF issue collector, used by Zope Corp and the Zope developer community as their central issue tracking facility from 2001 through 2006, well beyond my tenure at Zope Corp.
  • Extensive use of Z Wiki for Zope Corp customer and developer community collaboration is based on innovations i instituted and championed for supporting internal, customer, and community collaboration. In particular, Z Wiki organizability extensions, which i designed and implemented for use in the effort (and which have since been adopted as a key Z Wiki feature, along with other of my Wiki For Now? enhancements), enable some degree of organization necessary for collaboration in large-scale development projects.
  • I engineered Zope Corp's CVS setup. I designed and managed this arrangement (in addition to my core and consulting developer duties), and it was used throughout Zope Corp's internal, customer, and developer community projects, from 2000 through 2006. Enhancements beyond conventional CVS capabilities included secure, scalable assignment of write privileges to customer and community collaborators; intricate sharing of repository structure across projects, controlled by CVS-managed config files; informative checkin notifications that respect the sharing scheme, and much more.

Crafty Hacks

Crafty Hacks are smaller-scale hacks of which i'm proud, because they owe their effectiveness more to judicious logistical/strategic leverage than to computational force.

Personal Utilities

Emacs Allout

Code, incidentals, and info for my Emacs outliner, Allout. (Emacs is an insanely capable and extensible text editor used mostly by programmers.)

Itunes Playlist Sync

Mac OS?-specific python script for synchronizing designated iTunes playlists to target filesystem folders, eg to synchronize your playlists to mounted personal media player or smart phone directories. Fairly efficient and comprehensive.

killp

A unix script for discriminating process termination.

Current Projects

I'm giving myself time to incubate some projects of my own, itches i've wanted to scratch for a long time:

Scalable Community Coordination

a project to develop online services supporting coordination of grass-roots, activity-based community groups across the range of their activities, from local to regional to global scope. project design is under way as of November 2006.

Turning Answers Into Stories

long-range effort to scale collaboration, "cascading knowledge".

Systems Project Notes

incidental notes for systems projects

See Also

A NewsForge open-source personality profile about me(!): Feasting on life with veteran programmer Ken Manheimer. (The "meat and potatoes" diet is an oversimplification that was taken a little too literally, but the reality is still pretty unusual.)

A Library science interview: An Interview with Paul Everitt and Ken Manheimer of Digital Creations, publishers of Zope

See Creative Process for some backstory/ramblings about my perspective on programming and other potentially creative endeavors.

Perlis Programming Epigrams has some excerpts i favor from Alan J. Perlis' "Epigrams in Programming", http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

I compiled the orphaned Python Humor Page when i was managing python.org - one way to contribute something funny without actually warranting an entry of my own on the page...

Mesa