Today I participated in a spontaneous online mini-sprint on the UpStage server: sitting at home in munich, I watched Paul’s computer screen on the other side of the world in Auckland, NZ; the green square that was his cursor flicked along lines of white text – the guts of the UpStage server in Wellington. Beside it in Skype, there was a rapid conversation in another language between Paul, Heath & Vibhu (all in Auckland) and Martin (in Germany) as they negotiated the file structure of the server. Pids & configs & grep & cats – i’m pretty sure they weren’t talking about the friendly furry kind – especially since there were frequent suggestions to “kill it” … !

In Paul’s command line interface I watched scrolling lists of filepaths interspersed with commands. We were using a desktop viewing service called Mikogo which lets multiple people view someone’s screen at the same time – pretty handy for this kind of thing. Not only were the sighs of frustration and shouts of triumph shared, there was a lot of learning and exchange going on. As a non-programmer, I find it fascinating to peer into this world and get a glimpse of what happens “under the hood” of UpStage; as well as educational and fun to hang out with these people for a couple of hours and soak up a bit more knowledge.

Let’s do it again! 🙂