London 2011

Last week was Random Week. This is something we have every 6 weeks where everyone gets to pick a project to work on just for that week – anything they want, usually something that is an improvement to our products, processes or infrastructure and that might not normally get scheduled as a high priority in the roadmap.

But this time it was a little different – last week the entire team flew in to London and we all worked together in the same office for the first time! We put everyone up in a nice hotel and went out for meals together, and with our investors. This involved people traveling in from the US, Canada, Portugal, The Netherlands and 4 of us from around the UK.

What did we work on?

• A Chrome extension with alerting notifications for Server Density.
• A replacement for Unix cron to give us more flexibility, code level control and proper notifications on failures.
• A detailed network level monitoring daemon to help us troubleshoot some recent network packet loss issues.
• Server Density postback API changes to allow historical data to be bulk imported.
• Prototype code for offline caching for the monitoring agent so it can hold data in case of networking issues or if our service is unavailable.
• Improvements to our external monitoring nodes to make them run faster and under less load.
• A Hipchat bot with a first plugin to query the Server Density API for server data.
• Continued work on our new metrics storage service which allows for longer data retention and more granular data points (every 1 minute) for our graphs.
• T-shirts!

Detailed blog posts for each one are being drafted so everyone can tell their own story and we’re just putting the finishing touches to the stuff we’re planning to release publicly. Plus every team member gets a special limited edition (2 each) “London 2011″ t-shirt (inspired by band tour t-shirts).

This is something we’re planning to do every year so many thanks go to our lawyers, Orrick, who let us use their fancy offices in The City for the whole week for free!