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10th ShipIt Day at Six Feet Up Is Complete

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May 28, 2013
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At Six Feet Up we like to hold a ShipIt Day every quarter. We truly believe in what Atlassian started and use it as a great way to foster creativity, have fun, and let our team members focus on a project that they are passionate about. We also like to try out different spaces and get out of our office every now and then.

This time ShipIt day was held May 9-10th at our office. Our last ShipIt Day was held at Launch Fishers. We also had a guest, Kyle Shipley a local entrepreneur, visit us during ShipIt Day to learn about the event and see what we had done.

The team made a lot of headway building new packages, automating testing, creating new strategies, and cleaning up odds and ends. We got a lot done and the winning team got to donate $200 to the National Kidney Foundation. Below is a summary of each team and what they worked on.

ShipIt Day Projects

Team ArchNemesis (Lauren Lawrence)

Dir. of Account Management Lauren Lawrence developed a comparative analysis of the open source collaborative intranet KARL and several major intranet solutions. KARL stood out for customizability and a much lower cost per user due to it being open source. The analysis will serve as a strategic decision tool for use by Six Feet Up's Sales and Marketing team, and allow us to better serve our clients' knowledge management and collaboration needs.

Team Automatron (Christine Shaw, Elizabeth Stratton)

QA engineers Christine Shaw and Elizabeth Stratton automated the creation of accounts and content for one of our higher education clients. All that is required is the click of a button and thousands of accounts can be created, along with dozens of pieces of content for each account. Automating the loading of test data will save hours of tedious data entry in the future for the team. Additionally, the team spent their time learning more about testing tools such as JMeter.

Team KARLifornication (Chrissy Wainwright)

Sr. template developer Chrissy Wainwright applied some custom styling to the company's KARL instance, which was still using the default theme. Updates were made to the header, communities and rich text areas so the site would have a simpler and cleaner look.

Team MEGAtron (Jen Myers) WINNER

Dir. of Accounting Jen Myers consolidated several worksheets that had been created in the past and used for our monthly hosting billing process. Content of the spreadsheets was cleaned up, updated with items considered beneficial and information deemed unnecessary was deleted. By consolidating all the information into one spreadsheet, it has created an effective reference tool and will make for a more efficient monthly hosting billing process in turn creating faster turnaround of payment from our customers.

Team Mr.Fission (David Blewett, Nolan Brubaker)

Senior developer David Blewett and Nolan Brubaker refactored a recent large Pyramid project, with the goal of pulling out re-usable code. They were able to create a base utility package (sixfeetup.bowab), and a package that builds on this to allow through-the-web editing of application configuration values (pyramid_controlpanel). The utility package includes a Recaptcha deform widget, deform CSRF validating schema and basic SQLAlchemy initialization code.

Team Groundwire (Jen Mukes)

Sales Support Professional Jen Mukes took on the project of organizing all information related to Groundwire clients. Google Docs and our CRM system were updated with appropriate client contact information, specific server instance and Plone version. Wiki pages were updated and created to display all relevant content including site logins, project milestones and job codes, and all open tickets and projects. The organization of all information makes the project management and scheduling process much more efficient.

Team Thrift (Clayton Parker)

Director of Engineering Clayton Parker worked on connecting our time sheet data in Timetask to our projects in Trac. This would allow us to see accurate time spent data in Trac on each ticket, making it easier to analyze where we are at on a project at any given time.

Team Tidy (Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Luke Jarymowycz)

Team Tidy worked on cleaning up the Fortville Data Center and storage, recycling, auctioning and removing old equipment. They cleaned up and reconfigured the Fortville network to provide a more flexible framework for both Six Feet Up, out clients and on-site tenants.

Post ShipIt Day Report: The auctions netted over $400! The team also cleaned up the wireless network here in the Fort as well.

Team Misc. (Michelle Jarvi)

Team Miscellaneous took on a variety of communication-orientated projects for Six Feet Up. Including a detailed research report on companies with remote and in-office employees, news items, and clean-up of opportunity data in Six Feet Up's CRM. Account Manager Michelle Jarvi attended this ShipIt Day remote from France and spent time conducting first-hand research for the report.

Team Thingimifier (Jim Bartek, Carol Ganz, Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker)

Team Thingimifier worked on creating three product profiles around our new syndication solutions. Led by Dir. of Marketing Jim Bartek, the group worked through solution diagrams, service offering metaphors and analogies, proof points, value statements, technical talking points (scope, application, architecture), problems, pains, opportunities, customer segment profiles, and competitive advantages.

Next ShipIt Day August 8-9th, 2013:

Our next ShipIt Day will be August 8-9th in the Indianapolis area. As Always Six Feet Up will be opening its doors to any third-party participants or observers interested in deploying the ShipIt Day concept in their own organizations as a way to promote healthy and effective employee motivation practices. For more information, please contact info-AT-sixfeetup-DOT-com.