Summersault Blog

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

INDIANAPOLIS, IN — Summersault was proud to be a sponsor and participant in Blog Indiana 2008, the first state-wide conference about blogging and new media, which concluded here today.

The event was attended by more than 160 people from the region who were interested in all aspects of blogs, blogging, social networking, and related topics. Presentations and panels covered were available on “beginner,” “business,” and “general” tracks, while panels and networking events allowed for more informal discussion and interaction about these tools and technologies.

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Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because we want to try to be all things to our clients doesn’t mean that we can be. Of course, for any given project, the conversation about what’s possible, and on what timeline, and at what cost is never a simple one. The bigger the project, the more complex that conversation becomes. It can be easy to over-promise and under-deliver if you’re not extremely careful.

Several years ago, we began using parts of the “Extreme Programming (XP)” software engineering paradigm in our development process, with the goal of improving our time estimates, better understanding what we were able to deliver to our clients and when. I’ve not found any part of XP to be more useful than the way it describes the interactions between these four variables:
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Ten reasons to work at Summersault:

1. Our mission is to build and sustain communities using the technologies of the Internet. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
2. We offer flexible scheduling, so you can arrange your work around your life, instead of arranging your life around your work.
3. We’re always working with interesting tools and technologies.
4. We pay 100% of health insurance for full-time staff and competitive premiums for spouses and dependents, including vision and dental benefits.
5. In-depth performance reviews provide you with concrete professional goals and feedback on your successes.
6. We have a volunteer and community service program that compensates you for being active in the community.
7. Our employee wellness program helps you to stay healthy.
8. We offer paid vacation time, up to four weeks per year.
9. We regularly recognize outstanding contributions that our staff make, in the office, to our clients, and out in the world.
10. We’re locally owned, and we give back to the community.

Interested? Check out our current openings.

Today I uploaded the first release of Titanium, a web application framework. This project really began about eight years ago, with first release of CGI::Application.

CGI::Application was and is a great foundation for web applications and has always been well defined with a small scope for what it would provide in terms of a framework. Because of this it was able to mature and stabilize with few bugs ever reported and always provided great performance because of its small size. It grew in popularity, and over 50 CGI::Application plugins were released.

The contributed plugins were a great gift back to the community from the many users who made them, but for newcomers, the choices could be daunting. They meant getting started with CGI::Application for an application of any size often meant wading through the many options for plugins, yet often coming to the same conclusions about which ones to choose.

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I recently discovered some new source code control workflows that are possible with darcs.

Just after I record a patch in my local repository, I often feel compelled to review it one more time before pushing into the central repo. “Did I record changes in just the files I meant to? And even within specific files, did I include just the changes I meant to?” With darcs, this check is easily done
after recording with darcs changes --interactive --last 1 or just darcs changes -i --last 1, for short. They key part here is --interactive which launches darcs in interactive mode.

I press “x” to view the list of files affected, or “p” if I want to review a kind of “diff” in a pager, and of course “?” if I need help to remember what the options are. Very handy!

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