Radar 28

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Roadmap (what?)

Short Term

???—We just got through the Balanced Shutdown. Need to take stock and regroup.

Long Term

[chadwhitacre]

Queues (what?)

Open	Closed	Queue	Description
0	23	Violations	private communication amongst the safety team
12	14	Security	private communication with security researchers
5	25	Legal	private communication with our counsel
10	906	Support	private communication with users
4	108	L2 Support	escalated support issues
20	69	Team Review	public review of applications for new teams
?	?	Errors	production errors
17	1,735	Vendors, etc.	private communication with our vendors (also includes low-volume mailboxes: safety and security)
20	116	Pivot	a milestone
14	54	Balanced Shutdown	a milestone
6	10	Milestones	all milestones
6	525	PR Review	work in the final stage before deployment
21	1,678	PRs	all work in progress
773	4,514	Issues	public communication with contributors

[chadwhitacre]

Deployment is hosed. Immediate concerns for me today are:

• Getting deployment back on track (I reviewed and merged a few PRs this AM and when I deployed I got a 500 and rolled back).
• Winding up refund advances gratipay.com#3810.
• Blogging about our refund situation.
• Coming up for air and thinking about what's next on the short-term roadmap.

[chadwhitacre]

Deploy issue: gratipay/gratipay.com#3821.

[chadwhitacre]

Deployment back on track. I've looked at gratipay/gratipay.com#3810. We still need to refund advances on Braintree (we just did Balanced), which'll take some work. I going to take the rest of the day off (holiday here, kids are home). I'm off tomorrow, so I'll plan to pick up with Braintree refunds on Wednesday and then look at a blog post.

[kaguillera]

A well deserved break
!m @whit537

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks, @kaguillera. Happy birthday! :-)

[rohitpaulk]

🎂

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! Caught up on local queues—Inbox 2, GitHub 0, Vendors 0, L2 Support 0!

Also getting pumped for Speak Freely: #334. @kzisme Here's the event to promote: https://twitter.com/SpkPgh/status/652403773843841024.

[chadwhitacre]

Let's see about refunding advances on Braintree ... gratipay/gratipay.com#3810.

[chadwhitacre]

Oh! Also ... I ran into @elliottw over the weekend, and we talked about me working from Catapult one day a week, starting maybe next week.

[kzisme]

Posted once about the event! I'll post again tomorrow as well! Exciting!

Happy birthday @kaguillera!

@whit537 Co-working spaces seem awesome!

[mattbk]

What is "refunding advances"? I guess I'm confused as to where we are regarding https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/140-000-97d54e6d40ed and escrow and everything...

[chadwhitacre]

What is "refunding advances"?

@mattbk We had two main sources of escrow:

1. ~$120,000 is because we allowed people to receive money on Gratipay without withdrawing it.
2. ~$10,000 is because we charged people in advance instead of in arrears.

On gratipay/gratipay.com#3810 I've been refunding the escrow due to (2). Early returns are that our success rate with refunds on Balanced was only about 15-20%, which means that even if we had gotten around to (1) before Balanced turned off their refund API last Friday, there was no way we were going to be able to zero out our escrow.

I guess I'm confused as to where we are regarding https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/140-000-97d54e6d40ed and escrow and everything...

Once I land gratipay/gratipay.com#3810 I'm planning to write a follow-up blog post to that one.

[chadwhitacre]

The short story is that we didn't make it in time (but it wouldn't have mattered anyway) and so we'll be holding money indefinitely, which is good news if you want to withdraw your 1.0 money or migrate tips to a Team.

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme P.S. a finer point re: Twitter ... http://dirkhoag.com/2012/10/how-to-twitter-why-do-people-put-a-period-in-front-of-tweets-86.

Re: https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/654529569542828032.

;-)

[chadwhitacre]

Started on that blog post, will maybe get to work on it again later tonight.

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk @kzisme Re: tweets about "Why didn't you contact me?" ... see also: gratipay/project-review#85.

[chadwhitacre]

P.S. We're building something incredibly awesome. I love working with you all. :-)

!m *

[chadwhitacre]

Prolly gonna need to go to two days/wk consulting, meaning down to two days/wk for Gratipay. Probably Mondays and Wednesdays for Gratipay. I'm thinking Mondays for user-facing (cowo at Catapult) and Wednesdays for Team X and admin/bureau (cowo at Blue Canary, w/ @kaguillera ideally).

[chadwhitacre]

🍸

[chadwhitacre]

https://archive.org/details/Skyfoot2013-08-05

[chadwhitacre]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i-m_yaFh2k

[chadwhitacre]

I want to work on infrastructure, so @rohitpaulk @rorepo @yifeiwu @fenryxo et al. can rock on actual real code.

[chadwhitacre]

Embarrassment Driven Development (EDD): What is the most embarrassing thing about our situation? Let's fix that first! Oh, the pain!

Front of the house and back of the house.

Front of the house:

• Weak listing on homepage. Can't filter, can't link to "Unreviewed" vs. "Approved" etc., no paging, no sorting.
• Weak ACTUALLy PAYING PEOPLE/TEAMS fLOW. Like, the Team pages are weak. That is so, so central to the whole darn thing. It's the crucial, central, ineluctable point of immediacy.
• "The Chalkboard" is a little goofy. Not super embarrassing.
• Oh! Giving, receiving, numbers not being trustworthy: that is embarrassing. Amateur hour! :-(
• Everything else is a mess, but prolly after the above.

Back of the house:

• WE"RE NOT USING IMMUTABLE IDS EVERYWHERE. I mean, seriously, what the heck was I thinking? "O H I"LL BE CLEVER I CAN DO IT." Sorry. 😞
• API! A real one! I found a pattern I like on ledger gratipay.com#3786 (comment).
• Everything's a mess. We need to document everything, starting with API endpoints, migrating everything over as we're able.
• postgres.py is ready for an update.
• aspen.py is ready to be driven to 1.0.

That's what embarrasses me. What embarrasses you?

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk @kzisme et al. Here's a rough draft of a blog post about the refunds:

https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/1-0-money-available-indefinitely-39c07bd031b

Let's try and get that out the door tomorrow, eh?

[kzisme]

@whit537 I like the post the only part that reads funky to me is "We were only able to refund $3,089.23"

That whole paragraph could be formatted differently rather than having some of the numbers run together. Other than that it seems great!

Also, I suppose the EDD as shown above could be fleshed out into their own issues, right?

P.S. - I didn't know that adding a '.' before a tweet allowed for followers to see the tweet as well as have it reply to your own. Thanks for pointing it out 👈

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme I think there's tickets for everything already.

Also embarrassing:

• Can't edit Teams! make Teams editable gratipay.com#3545
• Books aren't balanced! Accounting