3rd FedEx Day: 7 Projects in 24 Hours

On April 28-29, 2011 Six Feet Up held its third FedEx Day, a quarterly internal event that fosters creativity, intrinsic motivation and team collaboration. What follows is a summary of the accomplishments the various teams achieved in 24 hours:

Team MARKETING completed no less than 4 projects and presented the rest of the team with a new eco-friendly give-away concept for upcoming events, a new Six Feet Up-branded apparel selection, a detailed referral commission plan and a revision of our website's main navigation elements (it is rumored the team stayed up till 2 am debating a reorganization of our hosting section). Team MARKETING received the second prize for Best FedEx Day Project.

Team Tinderbox resolved several issues with the Tinderbox build server. Specifically, all OS versions and architectures supported by Six Feet Up are configured now. The team determined how to pass custom build options for ports to solve specific needs Six Feet Up uses.  They also wrote a series of small management scripts to more easily add ports to all build environments.

Team Get Down evaluated a markdown-to-PDF solution as part of an effort to replace our current MS Word based proposal format. They put together a script combining several conversion tools (multimarkdown, wkhtmltopdf) that allow for a full conversion between a standardized and easy to manage markdown proposal format and a themed PDF document. Team Get Down was voted the Best FedEx Day Project.

Team RedMine evaluated Redmine as a replacement for Trac as the company project management tool.

Team Lapider got back to the owners of products that the developers team had worked on. The team released a new version of lineage.index based on the owner's recommendations after he reviewed our changes. The tests and documentation in Products.CMFNotification were also updated and the owner of the package was notified.

Team Diazo worked on building a Diazo Plone theme that has all default Plone elements in place. The team used the latest version of plone.app.theming to apply the theme to the test site. Using a static HTML file and a rules.xml, they put a template together that works similar to Plone's main_template. This will allow users of the theme to have the same starting point as a person doing traditional Plone theming. The theme integrates the editing elements, so that the authenticated user interface can also be styled. Team Diazo will check the theme in to the collective, but the end goal is to use it as a paster template.

Team Bat Woman went to the Bat Cave and used the Bat Phone to contact QuickBooks support to resolve some accounting discrepancies.  The Joker (the issue found in the software) was taken down.  Gotham City (Six Feet Up) is safe once more. Team Bat Woman received the third prize for Best FedEx Day Project.

Altogether the results were astonishing and team spirit was at its peak. All of us on the Six Feet Up team now look forward to the next FedEx Day that will take place in August 2011.