After a chat with some interested members last night, we’ve decided to start an infrastructure meetup.
We’re going to try Fortnightly, 6pm on Fridays, alternating online and at the space.
The first one will be online, 6pm tonight the 24th of Feb 23. (Short notice but it just worked out that way with availabilities)
The goal is to get some movement happening with infrastructure items and move towards defining some kind of infrastructure group, how it operates etc, and then to continue on as a checkin/standup and mini working bee.
Anyone who is infrastructure curious or thinks they could help out, please you’re very welcome. If you dont know what that means, its all the techy sysadminy service stuff around the space. So servers, software, network, interlocks, door control, ‘smart home’ features, any kind of smart devices in the hackerspace like smart gas meters, compressed air control, blast gate control etc. But, the first few meetings will try and define these boundaries a bit more clearly.
Theres no intent to form a ‘team’ at this stage because its a bit too much, but we might form some other type of working group with a small budget or similar. However if you’re doing work with the infrastructure group, that will count as volunteering commitment for the discount.
We have an already stated goal that we plan to keep individual workloads light as a priority. Its a marathon not a sprint. The idea is to move from 0kph to 1kph and not stress anyone out.
How should the group of people collaborate, what are the values and ways of working. How to accept/reject contributors etc.
How should the group interact and work with other parts of the space such as teams
Any guidelines or rules for infrastructure items (ie, no self-hosted services not dockerised and configured with docker-compose or similar IaC tool where compose is not possible)
A speedrun through existing infrastructure and how it hangs together.
A speedrun through taskade, planned changes, projects etc.
A quick word on the access policy
Backlog grooming taskade and assigning work.
Working bee activities. Most likely onboarding new contributors, helping people get access, things running, etc.
Generally positive reception, everyone to go away and have a think and come back with any changes etc.
People to consider what we want to do at these meetings, general structure. Not a standup but some kind of process.
Backlog grooming to happen continuously and then summarised / focused on at meetings
Meetings to be mostly working bee after initial status catchup
Action Items due by next meeting in a fortnight:
Josh H to do initial cleanup of taskade. Produce a project of ‘things on fire’ and get an interlock project cleaned up to show current state.
Brett W to get a working dev copy of the portal
Tim M to get a working dev copy of the portal, and produce documentation / taskade etc for the blast gate project from woodshop for presentation next meeting and acceptance.
Everyone to generally communicate on the discord.
Outcomes of actions:
Highest priority infrastructure tasks identified
Everyone able to contribute to portal at minimum
Adoption of Blast gate system
Next Meeting: Friday 10th March 6pm
Carry over of undiscussed items from this meeting (time limited this time around)
Official acceptance and publication of ways of working
Adoption of a meeting structure of some kind
Onboarding and task assignment
Thanks to attendees. If you’re involved or interested in infrastructure this is an open group and open meeting, just start participating if you want. Just trying to build some collaboration and velocity.
The next Infrastructure meetup will be 10th March, 6:30pm till late, onsite at HSBNE. All contributors or interested contributors to infrastructure welcome.
Agenda:
Accepting notes from first meeting
Successes and Achievements
Mini Standup.
What has been done since last meeting
Are there issues, blockers etc
What new work has arisen as a result
Accepting Infrastructure Way of Working document
Speedrun through existing infrastructure and how it hangs together
Speedrun through taskade, planned changes, projects, etc
Discusson re access policy
Backlog Grooming and work assignment
Working bee activities from there
Please post in thread if you plan to attend. I’m happy to supply food and drink so if you have preferences please shout out.
Josh went through the list of things on launcher and gave quick descriptions of what they are and why they’re there.
Josh quickly gave overview of the taskade infrastructure projects. Went into some detail regarding the ‘on fire’ items.
Josh described the difficulties with the access policy, mainly that theres a lot of services, with internal permissions, and a lot of people and groups to give and remove access from/to. SSO will help some of this. Trying to establish some kind of overall ‘groups’ of people and basing the access matrix on that
might be simpler.
Everyone to have a think about this for the next meeting
Discussion and plans next meeting
Backlog grooming
Established that at the moment the new interlock build is highest priority
Tom to focus on the portal to mqtt integration
Josh to focus on the CAD work
Ryan M (Not Present) to focus on the PCB Revisions
Ryan K to provide some improvements to the existing system
Tom proposed to do some network refactoring to bring in separate vlans, saner subnets, segregate IOT further.
Josh pointed out the Johnny Decimal semi-convention and the idea of allocating subnets as such, no strong opinion on doing it just fyi.
Tom to do at his discretion
Ryan K stated wanting to refactor his code on existing interlocks, mainly to fix caching functionality.
Ryan K to do this
Ryan K stated he needed to learn home assistant, esphome etc. Josh said if he wanted to learn-by-doing he could take on the Compressor Automation Project.
Ryan was interested in this. Josh provided all components to Ryan K.
Ryan K to implement the ESPHome driven Compressor Automation, to do automatic tank draining and monitor pressure.
Tom to continue to update and finish docs regarding new blast gate and controller system.
Tom stated that network changes would necessitate changes to porthack config. Josh said maybe we should do some of the basic remediations to port hack
first. Tasks stated but not assigned as network changes are discretionary and low priority.
Get all config tracked by git by separating out secrets
Get the backup system working and confirmed
Josh stated a committment to bringing the shlink service back online.
Josh to bring shlink service back online.
Next Meeting
The next meeting of the infrastructure contributors will be 24th of March, 6:30pm online on Discord.