It may be the end of the day for the business but as usual there are still many folks around, tapping away at their keyboards to meet those deadlines. Me, I’m leaving soon but I’ve still got a 3 hour journey before I get to home sweet home in London’s East End!

Another busy Monday has arrived to the Development floor. Our latest big (understatement of the year! – Ed) project to build a platform to support Madasafish customers is going ahead well on schedule – a good few guys and gals have given up a few hours over the weekend to come in and work, which has resulted in a significant drop in our list of bugs. Great job!

This project is providing a good opportunity to the newer members of the team (including myself) to participate in varied sides of development- learn existing codebase and participate in brand new development. I’ve been working on mail, Rys and Lucazs are working on products, Emilia worked on a discount tool, and we all got a fair share of bug fixes.

Also, this weekend saw a birthday celebration of Rowan, the Lead developer of our Remote Development team, Happy Birthday to Rowan from the rest of the dev team! (Now, where’s that cake?)
Today has been a fairly normal day for Network Operations. In addition to ensuring that our internal staging and development systems are fighting-fit and performing our normal day-to-day housekeeping duties we’ve been …

• handling the normal flow of customers’ questions. These range from suspected email problems, through DSL speed problems, to helping customers with non-standard system configurations.
• performing some of the prep-work required before we can add capacity to one of our Sheffield-based hosting facilities. This involved moving network switches and various other items of network equipment to one of our build rooms and measuring various distances within the datacentre in question so we know how much fibre-optic cable is required.
• developing a way to integrate IWF filtering into our network as part of our commitment to being a responsible member of the internet community
• diagnosing various internal problems ranging from failed hard drives through to unresponsive servers.

Today has been a somewhat chaotic day in Products, with all my Monday reports taking second place to the current Hardware P1 problem. Unfortunately the P1 has pushed my workload back and I have to play catch up on my daily tasks.

The Master of Churn (aka Shaun) has continued work on Churn/usage analysis. Shaun has also worked on the weekly KPI reports, project reporting specs and XML submission failure reporting.

Rich has been working on VoIP related tasks, this involved; creating a test plan for staff users, refining a delivery plan with Comms & Portal Team, further refining new MyAccounts pages and defining e-mail content with the Comms team.

Dave’s been looking at Ventrilo problems, as well as working on his next blog post, hardware testing and looking at Max Regrades. Dave has also continued to work through his ticket pool.

It’s been another solid day in QA. In contrast to the weather outside being wet and grey, the mood of the team has been fairly upbeat it’s safe to say.

My colleagues have all been working hard on getting the Madasafish project bugs squashed and, since we’ve got to hit the next milestone by Friday, the pressure is definitely on. This is just the kind of time when your workmates pull together and you can feel a buzz in the air. It’s what PlusNet is about!

Me, I’ve been attempting to hold back the regular tide of problems that QA normally deals with like some mad Canute figure. Considering this is a burden shared between two people most of the time it’s been hectic. However I’m pleased to say yet more work tidying up the loose ends of the Community Site move has now made it live. I know some of our customers have been keen to see this happen, so thanks for being patient all this time.

In fact it’s been so busy that no-one’s had time to buy Nik-Naks (that and Gary’s off today). However the department has demolished another jar of jelly beans. So far no-one has choked on them despite their best efforts.

The start of another week in Marketing and we are 2 men down – Phil and Mark on annual leave. Martyn has been working on a upcoming direct mail campaign and another Christmas promotion (more next week). I’ve been finalising the copy for the Newsletter to be sent later in the week and preparing some press releases. Neil A is down in London meeting various journalists to talk about our future plans.

So, we start another week in Comms. Another week of forum frenzies, random dictionary.com words that I can’t pronounce, lunchtime beatings of Mr. Wild at pool, problem chasing, project workings, various meetings and finally, because it’s deemed neccessary, sleeping when it’s dark (which based on today, means I should have gone to bed at 4pm).

Today, I’ve been catching up on the various forum posts over the course of the weekend, doing a variety of personal tickets, dealing with a couple of Madasafish queries and looking into our signup and provisioning journey to try and work out where we can make some improvements. I also made tea.

Bob has been doing his relay policing, working on his VoIP Comms which should been seen any day now and also he’s been busy in our USENET groups, helping out wherever possible. He didn’t make tea.

Matt has been doing his usual work in the forums as well as helping Mand out looking after some problems and helping the CSC out with some general enquiries. He also made tea and went on a sandwich run! Bacon sandwiches FTW.

Mand has been dealing with our Recontracting campaign as well as looking into a couple of home phone issues in addition to her usual work in ensuring that our internal problem processes are running smoothly. She didn’t make tea.

Chris has been hiding upstairs today so that he doesn’t have to make tea. He’ll probably find out when he’s reading this that that I made tea for the entire team and didn’t tell him. On purpose. So there.

Pete’s gettng nostalgic in the Web Team EOD. As I mentioned in last week’s EODs it won’t come as any surprise to discover that we’re still busy building systems that will allow Madasafish to support its customers, on the new platform. Several of the guys came in over the weekend once again to put extra effort into the push to get this work delivered on time.

Jonathan has been fixing support pages for PlusNet including the Beginners Guide to PHP page, which had been breaking when the text file links were clicked upon.

Looking at this page takes me back. I wrote this page when PlusNet first put that new fangled PHP malarky onto the CGI server for everyone to play with (that’ll’ve been Crofters then I guess). In my day we had to get up in the middle of the night, one hour after we’d gone to bed, write thirteen support pages, train 10 new members of the CSC, release a new product and write a Press Release before we had lunch, which mind you, we had to pay for.. and you try telling that to Content Developers these days.. will they believe you?

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This entry was posted by Tamlyn Rhodes on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 6:20 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.