The start of another week at PlusNet brings us one week closer to Christmas and one step nearer the completion of our latest project.

Departmental updates follow from ….

We begin our update with Catherine in QA:

“Today, finally, has been the day when we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief and go and get some sleep as we’ve hit another major milestone. What a relief! We’re not stopping, though, as there’s still plenty to do….we’re just not working ten hour days any more And development in other areas of the business hasn’t stopped, either. I’m coming in tomorrow morning to test two – count ‘em, two – separate rollouts and Matt B is still slaving away on helping us get a better meeting co-ordination tool. Sadly, my suggestion of free doughnuts in every room didn’t make the final spec.

We’ve had Matt Taylor from Comms helping us for the last couple of days and, while he hasn’t made any tea, he has been very generous with the sweeties. Matt, you can come back any time you get sick of James harassing you!

Paul, as ever, has been on the problems, and keeping us amused sharing his regular dose of lolcats.

Gary was in for an overnight rollout so he hasn’t been here today and Gavin is on holiday until next Monday (good planning, eh?)

Finally, Matt R has been testing the remaining Madasafish bugs and suggesting that the drilling currently taking place extremely loudly just outside is in fact a speed bongos contest. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad “

Ian from the CSC brings us the following update:

“1. Router Setup.

The usual one. Customers are having problems settings up routers or having configuration problems.

2. Sales Calls.

Customers calling up with general enquiries and requiring product information.

3. Faults.

A number of customers calling in with updates to faults and general issues with the faults process.

4. Email Issues.

Most of these are general setup issues or antivirus/firewall configuration problems. Also seen another increase of SMTP Authentication issues on BB Essential, for which we have raised a problem.

5. Provisioning Updates.

Customers calling up with provisioning updates and calling up to discuss incompatible products and existing tags.”

Ryszu from Development:

“Dev’s EOD falls on my shoulders again today, so I apologise in advance if there’s excessive wafflemania. Still with me? Gooooood.

We’ve just hit a really major milestone in our biggest project (the biggest PlusNet have ever done in terms of programming), which lets us put a flag in the ground for our dev efforts, get some good live testing data, assess the landscape and then push on with the remaining work. Hopefully The Management and the rest of the business are happy with our work!

Crunch time in the last couple of weeks has been hectic, with some long hours put in (this is my 10th straight day in the office; I’ll have to look up Wikipedia and find out what “weekends” and “spare time” are again), all under pretty heavy pressure. The end result is some really badass development from everyone in the team to get us over the hill, and we’re all really proud of the effort. It’s not perfect — no twelvety bazillion LOC code base ever is — but it’s doing the right job at the right time.

Because it’s bugfix time, I’m getting experience all over the codebase, from the business tier and our framework, to portal login ,to component creation, to migration to RADIUS to invoicing to almost everything else take a deep breath where’s the comma key ohmygod. A bit of a rollercoaster ride recently then, with highs and lows, but a great experience for me as the newb. Come and work here and find out for yourself, we’re on the lookout for more good programmers to help. View our careers site if you’re interested.

I’ll try and talk MVC and efficient development next time they let me have the tiller here on the community EOD, stay tuned….”

For those that don’t know, LOC is Lines of Code and the MVC is the Model View Controller.

Josh from Networks brings us this update:

“Its been a bit of a mad Monday up in Networks today, with database and internal DNS problems affecting the portals this morning and our intranet this afternoon.

Around all this we have had the usual Monday morning ticket and task pile from the weekend, early morning rollouts ongoing and the need to keep on top of our ‘business as usual’ work like monitoring and projects.

Roll on Christmas. “

Chris has returned from Holiday to bring us the Comms update:

“Bob has been busy writing more comms about the Postini trial as well as keeping up a forum and newsgroup presence.

I’ve been busy catching up after my week off and also bouncing around the forums a fair bit.

James has been over with the CS team again ensuring that things are running smoothly.

Mand has done a bit of training for some of the n00bs while answering any questions thrown her way.

Matt has been helping QA again testing bugs and problem fixes.

Chris”

Marketing’s update comes from Chris (another one… really!):

“It’s been a bit of a stop start day in Marketing today – I’ve been to a series of different meetings and have been working on the Broadband Your Way Pro free games offer and festive blogs. I’ve also done some testing work for Madasafish and some work on an upcoming press release.
Spence has been busy working on an internal presentation and Martyn is enjoying some well-earned time off.
See you tomorrow. “

Alex from Finance brings us today’s update:

“It’s been a typically busy Monday in finance.

Today Mark J has been working on KPI’s and closing tickets mainly, I have been processing cheque payments and direct debits, James has been doing VAT returns and finally Mark B has been preparing information for the board meeting.

The finance department has also been enjoying the free selection box they got sent through the post as well”

It’s all right for some getting free selection boxes…

Colin from the Web Team:

“Today we’ve been working on problems, continuing to work on Madasafish and James has been working on an exciting new development project. The designers have been working on training a new starter, updating the website and redesigning the afore-mentioned careers site. I’ve also had a productive meeting about the new theme for the Community Site.”

And finally…

Darren from Products:

“So, I’m back from my week off and even though it’s only been a week it took a while to get back into my routine. I spent most of the day catching up on issues that had arisen while I was away and continued to work on hardware related problems. Shaun also made sure that I couldn’t get the Little Mermaid “Under the Sea” song out of my head……thanks Shaun.

Ian had a very good session with our CIO where they had a chance to expand our vision of our broadband packages and services. Ian has also been working with various suppliers.

Shaun has done the Weekly reporting, outlined new reporting requirements, BBYW additional usage analysis, product regrade analysis, signups taking hardware and testing an internal application (and doing a lot of singing, his rendition of “The Muppet Show Tonight” theme tune is quite scary)

Maria thankfully has been helping me on a current Hardware issue, preparing for the next PlusNet Monthly Rally, working on the product roadmap for the next financial year and attended the Directors weekly review in Neil A’s absence.

Rich has been extremely busy working to help eliminate any MAAF bugs. He has also been working on the VoIP platform and monitoring port requests in Dave’s absence.”

Have a good night, folks.

Colin

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This entry was posted by Colin Ogilvie on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 6:03 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.