Dave Jenkins

Huzzah for backcountry.com, on taking a big step toward full open source citizenship. My former employer announced last week that they would release some postgresql code back to the community. “Finally stop mooching” is how their usual informal press release put it, and props for that. The code allows for master< ->master replication across postgresql databases. It’s called ‘bucardo’ after an extinct goat that lived in the Pyrennes mountains that might be cloned back into existance (replicated, get it?)

Backcountry.com has a webfarm at a hosting center, and then a rootdb back at the warehouse– pretty standard setup. For the sake of speed, however, the company wanted to hold as much information (i.e. dynamic content) as close to the web servers as possible, and therefore wanted to replicate a good chunk of rootdb out at the ISP. If they were using Oracle, this would be a relatively straightforward configuration. However, because the system was built around Postgresql, we needed to configure somrething out. Enter the geniuses as End Point Communications — an entire system of flags sit around data tables, and these flags are synced back and forth, to determine which data then needs to be pushed to the other side. The trick here is to have the 2-way asynchronous flows of information while maintaining basic ground rules of data integrity.

The system has had several months of getting the shit beat out of it, literally. Early on, syncs would hang on a missing flag, or an unsuually large amount of data, and things would back up, only to then try and flow through like a traffic jammed freeway once the flags fell back into place. Well, redundancies have since been built into the messaging system, and the logic has been wrung to optimised levels where flags that don’t need to be in place are simply bypassed afte x minutes. It’s all rather elegant.

Props to all those that were involved with this, and special props to those at End Point who suggested the path to enlightenment lie in giving back to the community.

We launched a new website today, whiskeymilitia.com and it looks like it’s gonna be a winner. I knew we were onto something when I tried to register the security certificates for the encrypted shopping cart, and the submission was flagged for “review”. I am not sure if it was the word Whiskey (which the ATF probably doesn’t like) or Militia, which the Department of Milk and Cookies probably doesn’t dig. My hunch was confirmed when another backcountry executive was talking with someone in the Intarweb business, and was told that the domain ‘breaks every rule about good domains.’
So, what’s the deal with the site? One shit-hot deal at a time for all you skate rats and surf punks. Sold out? Cry about it until midnite, and try again. Good luck with your credit rating!

The legal term corpus juris is used to note a book or record that has legal ramifications. The U.S. Code is so massive, unfortunately, that judges or lawyers will often use the overwhelming volume as a tool for their judgements, even if the plantiff or defendant had no idea what was written in there. Who has time to read through the whole thing? nobody. Nonetheless, that ‘ignorance’ does not diminish the validity of the code.  Similarly, a wiki with thousands of pages can assume a similar characteristic: massive amount of data with poor visibility from the sheer size.

The wiki is a wonderful thing for producing documentation and letting 10,000 flowers bloom. As an intranet, we are seeing processes, proposals, ideas, vendor backgrounds, monthly reports, and a myriad of details throughout the company. There are over 11,000 pages so far in the company. Unfortunately, no one has time to read it all. Worse, the very passive nature of it, and now the sheer volume of text, loses the punch for communication between managers.

“Where are you on project X?”
—- “DId you look at the wiki page for it? We wrote everything down.”
“No, I don’t have time. So where is it?”
—- “Okay. Let me esplain it to you in a meeting.”

Ah, the meeting. Like an over-friendly guest, there is no escaping the meeting.

Even then, the dense textual nature of the wiki (great for encyclopedia or software documentation) discourages the interactive dialogue that people use to sell each other on their concept, or their interpretation of the data. Alas, we are still slaves to the Powerpoint presentation.

There is some redemption here– and this seems to be the best use: insist that everyone at least skim through the wiki page before the meeting. If you write well enough, they may actuall read the whole thing. The wiki page becomes the primer for the discussion. If everyone has read the script, the play will unfold much more smoothly in the meeting. Also, the wiki makes a great place to gather all the source material for that *gack* Powerpoint (or OpenOffice presentation as I prefer) slides when you have to put them together.

So, what have I learned in the last 2 years with a wiki as an intranet?

1. Wikis are passive. They do not shout out and grab people’s attention. They are like great sponges that soak up facts, but are no good at reaching out and giving you those facts on a plate with a nice side salad.
2. Wikis are very good at collaborating texts from disparate contributors. This requires some force to get going, but once people catch on, they’ll never go back to attached MSWord documents
3. Wikis are good source material from which to build a presentation
4. Wikis are lousy at the actual presentation (no showmanship)
5. Wikis require a handful of bold editors and combiners, who will mash pages together and build those collaborative texts (see #2). Otherwise, every department would keep their own version of the story
6. The Recent Changes page is addictive.

So, all told, I am very happy with the wiki as an intranet. I overestimated people’s level of reading through the liber. There is no escaping the showmanship and the summations that managers want to see. It’s a great tool to get everything written down– if anything to make sure your peeps are doing their homework and actually researching things. In otherwords, just about anyone can bullshit their way through some bullet list powerpoints, but it is very difficult to bullshit your way through the longhand text of a wiki page: people cannot write lies that long, unless they are going for absolute fiction, which shows up in the text soon enough.

For all those who may not know, I have moved back to Salt Lake City, Utah, and have joined Backcountry.com, an ecommerce company specialising in outdoor gear, specifically high-end gear. I am working as the CTO, and am happily reunited with some old friends from BackInTheDay.

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