There's a rich tradition consisting of smashing a bottle of champagne across the bow of a newly laid ship as the hull slides out of dry dock into the sea. If the bottle fails to break it's generally considered a bad sign that the ship is cursed and woe to the sailor duty-bound to serve in her.
I don't know how this applies to ventures that don't possess bows upon which bottles can be smashed, but if it's any consolation to the sailors aboard the U.S.S. IC Webteam Blog, I took a sip of Jefferson's small batch straight bourbon before writing this. It's not my bottle and my liver is pretty sensitive so just a few milliliters but that ought to be sufficient to save us from the rocks.
The purpose here is to provide something we've typically been loathe to provide: output. It's not that we don't like talking (or writing). Quite the contrary; I welcome any occasion to lard on a bunch of dumb jokes and overly flowery turns of phrase. But I've always considered that a separate thing from development work and have spared my somewhat turgid prose for other things.
I'll admit that I somewhat relish the role of the hidden mover and shaker, but Georgia Tech is an institution that touches an absurdly large number of people—some 40,000+ employees and students, to say nothing of alums, parents, corporate and government partners, football fanatics, etc. It's not really my personal technical playground. So in the interest of professionalism, we are going to try out a different role. I'm not sure yet what ludicrously distended nautical metaphor I'll settle on to describe this change—perhaps we'll be the boatswain now. Who can say really?
On to business. As long as we're doing new and different things, we're taking a stab this year at something like code sprints. Each month we'll be spending a week focused on diminishing the often towering piles of issues associated with several high-profile projects, to wit: Mercury Reader, Mercury, the News Center, the GT Theme, and the Calendar. Keeping these projects moving forward at anything other than a glacial pace has always been a challenge; maybe this will help. We'll find out soon enough, as this is the week of Mercury Reader. Expect issue resolutions; hope for many of them. A new version of the module will be published by the end of this week or early next.
Cheers,
Fletch