Kolab Now Really Beta (DevOps Edition)

This week, I accidentally made Kolab Now Beta really beta — though pre-alpha more than beta, strictly speaking — completely intentionally; Oops, I #devops'ed https://t.co/zp9ncO0w1k — Kolab Operations (@kolabops) September 5, 2017 I can now proudly announce it runs off of otherwise public GIT source repositories directly, and the developers working on the projects involved…

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Owner

Dear Melissa Perri, I’ve read your article entitled “Product Manager vs. Product Owner” with interest,  and I recommend my readers also browse Melissa’s blog for other interesting articles. However, I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully disagree with some of your article’s implied rhetoric to be entertained and conclusions, and challenge others. In my…

Your First Steps w/ Phoenix and Elixir

Here’s how you can start taking your first few steps with the Phoenix Framework: # cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ # wget https://obs.kolabsys.com/repositories/home:/vanmeeuwen:/erlang-18.3/Fedora_23/home:vanmeeuwen:erlang-18.3.repo # wget https://obs.kolabsys.com/repositories/home:/vanmeeuwen:/nodejs-5.8/Fedora_23/home:vanmeeuwen:nodejs-5.8.repo # wget https://obs.kolabsys.com/repositories/home:/vanmeeuwen:/phoenix-1.1/Fedora_23/home:vanmeeuwen:phoenix-1.1.repo Next is the most difficult step: # dnf install phoenix And why not participate in our experiments on this technology? It’s dead easy to get started. Next week, what…

You Board First When You Have Status

A status board describes the services the way they run — in full effect, with some connotations, perhaps with a defect or failure. Whichever may be the case of the situation at that moment, though — a status board reflects the current state. I believe it does not solely reflect the current state. I believe…

The Kolab Weekly

Welcome back to the Kolab weekly. In these weeklies, I summarize what’s been happening in the Kolab universe 😉 Product Ownership I’m pleased to announce we have an official product owner: me. More on this later, but … This means that I’m in charge of understanding what the needs are for feature requests that come…

Waterfall or Agile?

The Kolab development team uses the agile development methodology called Scrum. This is an iterative development process set out to achieve a predictable, consistent flow of incremental improvements to a software product, and as such is basically considered mutually exclusive with the concept of a pre-defined end-result. As I’ve mentioned many times before, Kolab includes…

Short- vs. Long-term Commitments

It is not commonly understood how software development projects moving forward as fast as they can and sometimes do, can be in direct conflict with their actual rate of adoption, not to mention their commercial delivery to market. This post outlines the differences between short- and long-term commitments, and how the distinction can be used…

The Evolution of Kolab Development

In the past, even before I joined the Kolab community, our product was released on a feature-based schedule. We’ve changed that to time-based releases, with an aim to be able to provide something new every 6 months or so. We’re now changing it again, but not in the way you might think. Not too long…