Drizzle

UPDATE:  Our donation link was broken, but has been fixed.  Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Since it's inception in 2008 Drizzle has taken the approach of an open source community project. It's been run as a meritocracy by its developer community, with developers from various companies and just individuals. Even though at first Sun and then Rackspace did sponsor a core team to work full time on the project, the project is not owned by any particular company, but Drizzle is developed by a vibrant and diverse community. We've been proud to have between 20-40 active contributors each month.

With the first stable release in March 2011, interest in the project grew. At this point we also decided it was time to solidify and clarify the status of the project as a non-profit community project. Out of a couple options available, we chose to become an Associated Project at the Software in the Public Interest. The SPI is a charitable US non-profit corporations that acts as an umbrella organization to many open source projects, including some well known ones like Debian and PostgreSQL. Drizzle was accepted as an SPI Associated Project by the Board on August 10th.

At this point, we would like to extend our gratitude to Josh Berkus (a PostgreSQL lead developer) who guided and sponsored Drizzle through the application process! We appreciate not just your experience and expertise with the SPI, but also the gesture of friendly help between two open source database projects.

Having a legal entity behind Drizzle has a number of useful benefits and any open source project that is bigger than just one or two guys should seriously consider using one of these umbrella organizations.

One benefit that is available to us starting this week is that you can now donate money to Drizzle via the SPI. The easiest way to donate is using a credit card at Click & Pledge. The SPI website lists some alternative methods such as using a cheque. For US tax payers donations are tax-deductible and if you are a business you can of course write the donation off as an expense.

Donations made via the SPI bank account will be properly accounted for by the SPI treasurer. Please read above links on how to "earmark" your donation for Drizzle. Available funds will be used by the Drizzle
project primary for expenses such as legal or IT infrastructure and secondary for arranging developer meetings and if possible sponsoring attendance at conferences. Note that if you want to sponsor development of Drizzle, such as a particular feature, and you have a large enough budget to be usable for that purpose, we recommend you rather contract such development directly via one of the commercial service providers that employ Drizzle developers.

Drizzle Developer Day 2011 will be held Friday April 15th at the Santa Clara Hilton Hotel in the Coastal Ballroom (map) which is right across from the Santa Clara Convention center. We will get started around 9:30 a.m. and should finish up by 4:00 p.m.

We invite anyone interested in providing feedback, implementing new features, helping to fix bugs, or just wanting to learn more about Drizzle to attend. Make sure to sign up here as soon as possible as space is limited.

Hope to see you there

-Lee

We are designating this Wednesday February 23rd as Drizzle documentation review day. All the Drizzle developers will be reviewing our current documentation for technical errors, missing sections and general improvements. We encourage anyone who would like to improve the quality of our docs to join in this effort, contact us on #drizzle on Freenode, send some email to the discussion list (drizzle-discuss@lists.launchpad.net) or file a bug if you spot anything we could improve on.

-Lee

Yesterday Monty moved us over to Jenkins for our continuous build system. For those of you who might have been following the drama on this situation we hope you will consider moving also!!

Get ready for Drizzle Developer Day 2011! Similar to the previous years it will be the Friday after the MySQL users conference, April 15 - 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We are still working on the exact location and will let you know as soon as possible, most likely it will be at or very close to the Santa Clara convention center. We invite anyone interested in providing feedback, implementing new features, helping to fix bugs, or just wanting to learn more about Drizzle to attend.

Make sure to sign up here as soon as possible as space will be limited.

Hope to see you there
-Lee

We made a lot of really great progress this past week during our bug blitz. Overall Drizzle stability and quality has greatly improved as a result of the blitz. Here are some of the highlights:

Yes, the numbers won't add up exactly as I had to track this by hand so a few may have slipped by in either direction. Thanks for everyone who helped out, this really made a big impact. While 125 still seems like a lot of bugs, if you look closely many of the bugs marked as Low or Wishlist are code clean up type bugs or very minor issues. Look for the Drizzle team to start doing bug blitz's on a regular basis.

-Lee

Next week, the week of January 10th, the Drizzle team is going to focus solely on fixing and cleaning up bugs. We are getting very close to our GA release of Drizzle7 for the end of February and everything is shaping up nicely. This will be a good opportunity to up the bar on our quality for the release.

Right now we have 153 open bugs. We have created a spreadsheet for better viewing of open bugs and will update this periodically as bugs are fixed. You can view the spreadsheet here. The second tab has some stats that shows totals of bugs by assignee, priority, milestone and status.

There are plenty of bugs there of all levels and many that are unassigned, so if you are so inclined please feel free to jump in and help out. If you see a bug you would like to tackle that is already assigned, contact the current assignee as there is more than enough to go around. Besides fixing bugs we could use some help with verifying bugs as several of these bugs are old and perhaps may not be valid any more.

See Monty's blog for a great summary of bug workflow in Drizzle and launchpad.

-Lee

Please join me in welcoming Marisa Plumb to the Rackspace Drizzle team. Marisa joins us as our Documentation writer to help organize and make some sense out of our current documentation as well as help to beef up our documentation going forward. I've already volunteered to introduce Marisa to many of the users in our community so she can get some feedback on what is working and what might be lacking.

Marisa's background is in writing, teaching, and web development. Her current research and projects investigate the influence of data analysis and technical literacy on media narratives and messaging. In recent roles, she has been a proponent of transparency and open source solutions in government and academia.

Marisa's IRC handle is marisap. Welcome to the team Marisa!

-Lee

We are looking to add a Drizzle documentation writer to the team for a 6 month contract. The position will play a key role to help drive documentation plans and implementation for the Drizzle project.

Skills and background required:

* Experience and solid understanding of Database technologies
* Experience working with open source communities
* Ability to work independently and openly with limited supervision
* Excellent written and oral communications
* Good planning, organizational, and time management skills
* Strong understanding of software development cycles
* 6+ years of technical writing experience with web based documentation
* Technical background and experience with databases a plus
* Experience using Sphinx documentation framework also a plus
* BS or equivalent work experience

Location may be in any of the Rackspace offices or working remotely.

If interested please apply here

-Lee