It’s been spooky goings on today at PlusNet… but work has continued

Brad in the CSC brings tonight’s update:

“Today in the CSC we have been blessed with all sorts of Halloween decorations. Some of our agents have even dressed up to make themselves look better

The Top 5 Issues in our Centre today have been:

1. Home Phone enquiries 20% – A lot of customers have received the email this morning about changes to Home Phone and were confused about the billing aspect.

2. Fault Updates 10% – Customers are still contacting us wanting to know the status of their ongoing fault.

3. New Faults 10% – Customers are reporting slow or loss of connection problems.

4. Hardware Enquiries 5% – We currently have a backlog of hardware orders which are in the process of being sent out.

5. Router config 5% – Customers ringing up to ask about how to set up their hardware.

Other 50%”

Ryszard from Development brings us today’s EOD:

“Howdy folks, it’s Ryszard in Development here. Dev updates have been a little thin on the ground recently, and as the team’s latest hire/victim, they’ve hoisted the EOD on me for today to try and kick our contributions back in to some kind of life. So if you’re all sitting comfortably, I’ll get stuck in.

As the new guy, barely into my third week, I’ve probably got a unique perspective on Dev here at PlusNet, so I thought I’d share a little bit about what it is to start as a shiny new developer here. The company’s constantly on the lookout for new talented programmers, simply because we have so many exciting systems to architect, build and deliver to you guys and the rest of the business.

We run a tiered and staged dev and deployment system here, and it’s one where each dev has a copy of pretty much the entire codebase on what we call an alpha dev system, or alpha box. That’s a dev’s local system for hacking on in terms of code, and it’s the first tier. So my first week or so (and I’m still doing little bits and pieces to it to improve how I work in week 3, and that’ll carry on even further down the line) was to build my alpha box, and get used to using it for developing code.

You get given a PC system with no OS, a Debian install CD and a copy of some pretty excellent new starter instructions. So almost as an induction test (I won’t call it a baptism of fire, but….well it is, just don’t tell anyone I said that!), and it’s up to you as a learning process to bring up your own system from scratch, where the end results are that you have a box in sync with everyone else that you can code on.

It’s a thinly veiled way of getting you to ask for help, too, which you _will_ have to. That’s a pretty important thing for a new starter to learn, and the alpha setup helps you do that. So no sitting there wondering why you can’t sync out of CVS (more on the pure joys of CVS in other dev EODs from me, should they ask me back for more!), or wondering why your local Apache configs don’t work, or myriad other things that could go a bit funny with your alpha. Why wonder when there’s 60+ other developers, all who’ve done the exact same thing, to lean on? Come and work here and you’ll soon learn that development is all about the team work and help in a very real sense.

I mentioned the tiered system earlier, and I’ll maybe talk about it in a bit more depth in other EODs, but alpha leads on to beta, and one more Greek letter of the alphabet before things go live, all while QA make sure what we’ve build doesn’t suck, and the platform team responsible for the live systems make sure we don’t try to roll out any nonsense. That said, I’m sure one day I’ll sneak out a piece of code that causes a P1 or two, so sorry in advance, and I’ll just blame Ben anyway. And there’s more than one Ben here, so I’ve got some choice there too, sweet!

Anyway, hopefully the above has given you a sense of what it’s like here in Dev, from the new guy’s viewpoint. It’s all about knowing your team and being comfortable with structured development, pretty much, and everything else flows on from that. I’ll talk some more about the basics of the technologies we kick around here at PlusNet some other time, since I’ve waffled on and on and on already.

So since it’s Halloween, I’m off to re factor some code to suit……CAaaarrrrghDebugAaargh::SatanicDumpRecurse($zombies, $doom, $applebobbing, $whydidwehirethisguy); will get me started….”

The Scary Clown (Sorry, Darren) from Products:

“BOOOOOOOOOOO…..Its Halloween and all the planning I have been talking about in my previous EODs finally took place. Last night a few of us stayed behind to decorate PlusNet Towers, I just want to say a big THANK YOU to Catherine in QA who stayed even longer after work hours with me to get all the spooky decorations into place, lets just hope all the staff enjoyed them.

Besides freaking people out with my clown outfit (and let’s face it, there is nothing scarier than a clown……well maybe Shaun in the morning) I have been busy modifying KPI charts, chasing up on some hardware issues, documenting issues with BT and taking over a new report. I was also part of the apple bobbing competition; I didn’t win, which is strange since I have such a big mouth.

Shaun has continued work on churn analysis, home phone analysis and adding more KPIs to the internal dashboard. He was also pretty upset that I didn’t tell him we had lollies in the canteen.

Maria has been a Witch….take that how you want to *runs and hides from Maria*. She has been extremely busy with a 1:1 with Neil, chasing BT on various different issues and catching up on the world of 21CN.

Rich has continued work on the VoIP platform and also provided promo offer details to finance to await signoff.”

Martyn from Marketing:

“Today we’ve been working on some leaflets for a forthcoming BBYW Pro promotion. They’re taking shape, so we’re happy with a job well done. Away from BBYW Pro we’ve been focused on some admin for our affiliate marketing programme, as well as writing some emails and attending numerous meetings.

Of course we’ve also been joining in with the Halloween fun, although my costume is much too hot and Tero’s hat has been giving him a headache! It’s not easy being scary…”

Kate from Finance:

“It’s been a quiet day amongst the finance team today due to illness and several people out of the office, nevertheless the rest of us are all feeling pretty proud of ourselves.

After weeks of backlogged tickets we have finally cleared all Finance ticket pools down to zero. Top effort to everyone in finance!

Besides tickets (as it’s that time again!), the team have been focusing on month end.

And Finally…..Special mention to Mark, who represented finance in the Hallowe’en apple bobbing contest, even though he was RUBBISH!!!”

Chris from Comms:

“Yet another day in the spooky world of comms..

James has been working away on some tickets and learning about Wholesale Broadband Connect as well as keeping the forums updated. All of this and he’s still wearing the flashing horns .

I’ve been keeping an eye on the forums too and doing a few tickets here and there, I’ve also been helping out the CSC with queries about the Home Phone email we sent this morning.

Mand has been busy training some new starters in the CSC and also managing the problem process. She’s also helped out with a number of billing and Home Phone queries as normal.

Bob has been upstairs with the Networks team making sure the Critical Path work is still going to plan. He’s written a few service status posts and generally been refusing to make tea.

More from us tomorrow, have a good night.”

Freddy Kruger (AKA Nick) from the Web Team brings us today’s update:

“Today some of the Web Team transformed themselves into a super-spooky sword wielding samurai, a giant fluffy pumpkin and a slash-tastic Freddy Kruger. Not a combination you see every day and certainly not one you’d usually see at work! Great fun though!

The Online Support Team were even awarded best-dressed department – which we’re rather chuffed about. We hope you followed and enjoyed the Halloween fun on the webcams.

In amongst all the merriment and games we’ve worked on Referrals improvements, fixed a number of support pages, rolled some Problems and carried on with project work. All-in-all it’s been a busy day of liaising with other departments and just cracking on with work!”

And finally, you can see the events of the day in the forum thread with more updates coming over the rest of the evening and during tomorrow.

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 7:07 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.