Form a RailsBridge IT / ops team

[lilliealbert]

I'm recruiting 3-5 volunteers to be the RailsBridge IT / ops team. Maybe we'll rename it once it exists!

Recruitment Plan

• Email individual people
• Email the workshop mailing list
• Post to Twitter

Team Description

The RailsBridge IT/ops team is looking for volunteers who want to help us improve our IT & ops practices! We have several projects that need an owner (improving our password management, administering our Google apps account, etc.). The team will have a team lead and several members, including the lead developer on Bridge Troll and at least one RailsBridge board member.

Expectations / Time Commitment

Time commitment will vary depending on the project(s) that the person is involved with, and at what stage the project is in (i.e., planning / execution / maintenance). We imagine that the time commitment could vary from 2-20 hours a month (probably a minimum of 1 hour of reading email / uptime reports a month 😃). The board has a few initial projects specified below, but the team should figure out where the RailsBridge IT/ops infrastructure needs improvement and go for it.

The team lead will send the board a very brief monthly report of its current projects and any blockers, challenges, or things that they could use the support of the board on.

Projects

Set up password manager

• Compare LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane (and any others) and pick a solution for RailsBridge (the solution does not need to be free)
• Determine necessary access levels (marketing team vs board vs chapter leads, etc)
• Provision user accounts, and rotate passwords
• Post process for getting an account / password access for future volunteers

Manage Google Apps

RailsBridge has a Google apps account that is currently managed by Sarah Allen and Lillie Chilen (and probably some other people with admin access). The IT/ops team will take over provisioning new user accounts.

Monitor RailsBridge.org, Bridge Troll, and Docs site uptime

Travis Grathwell is mostly responsible for Bridge Troll being up, and he, Lillie Chilen, and Jane Sebastian work on making sure RailsBridge.org is up. The IT/ops team will help manage monitoring / dealing with when the sites go down. (We're currently using Monitor.us, which is free, but only pings your site every 30 minutes, so that's a little sad.)

DNS

Hopefully Greg, who has volunteered to manage the RailsBridge DNSimple account, will join this team and continue to help with DNS needs.

Security

@tjgrathwell already responds pretty quickly to Rails or Ruby security patches for Bridge Troll, but it would be good for this team to be responsible for making sure that patches are applied in a timely manner, and maybe run Brakeman sometimes?

[tsykoduk]

I'm more then happy to continue to support the Railsbridge DNS, and take on other tasks as time permits!

[lilliealbert]

@tsykoduk Sounds great!

[jcaudle]

I'm happy to assist with DNS related stuff, as well as other areas as needed. I've mentored at the Indianapolis RailsBridge, but would love to help out here too. Monitoring and Security patches seem like a good fit for me, but I could help with the password manager decisions too.

[gallagher-kun]

I can help out with IT Ops at Railsbridge. I work in IT, so this is up my alley.

Been a Railsbridge student/TA/co-teacher for 5 or so workshops, and I'd love to help out anyway I can.

Where do I sign up?

[eanakashima]

@tsykoduk @jcaudle @jmunevar Awesome! We're going to do a short kickoff meeting on Monday, January 26th at 5:30pm PST via google hangout to introduce ourselves and figure out who's interested in what, but if you can't make it, no worries, just let me know. I'll try to post some notes after and keep you in the loop.

[eanakashima]

Thanks to everyone who made it to our kickoff call yesterday. If you couldn't make it, no worries — here's what we covered:

• On the call: Emily, Lillie, Rachel, Jonathan, Lena
• Introductions & fun facts. Everyone on the call is SF-based, although there were a few East Coast folks who were interested in helping out too. Lillie wants you to buy Squishables.
• There's a pull request open on the Ops repo with some ideas about how we'll work together in Ops Team README: some ideas ops#1 — please take a look and leave comments if you have ideas!
• We started a private repo (railsbridge/security) so that we have a private place to discuss any application security problems.
• If you volunteered and haven't been added to the railsbridge-ops Slack channel, @lilliealbert can add you.
• We'll open separate issues for each of the possible projects on the ops repo — if you're interested in volunteering for any of them, you can "watch" the (railsbridge/ops) repo and comment on any issues you're interested in helping out with. You can also open a new issue and tag it with "idea" if you have a project idea you want to propose to the team.

✨ ❤️

[alexch]

I'm lurking too. Sorry I couldn't make the meeting but I'm also around for
IT help.

• A

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Emily Nakashima notifications@github.com
wrote:

Thanks to everyone who made it to our kickoff call yesterday. If you
couldn't make it, no worries — here's what we covered:

• On the call: Emily, Lillie, Rachel, Jonathan, Lena
• Introductions & fun facts. Everyone on the call is SF-based,
  although there were a few East Coast folks who were interested in helping
  out too. Lillie wants you to buy Squishables
  http://www.squishable.com/.
• There's a pull request open on the Ops repo with some ideas about
  how we'll work together in Ops Team README: some ideas ops#1
  Ops Team README: some ideas ops#1 — please take a look and
  leave comments if you have ideas!
• We started a private repo (railsbridge/security
  https://github.com/railsbridge/security) so that we have a private
  place to discuss any application security problems.
• If you volunteered and haven't been added to the railsbridge-ops
  Slack channel, @lilliealbert https://github.com/lilliealbert can add
  you.
• We'll open separate issues for each of the possible projects on the
  ops repo — if you're interested in volunteering for any of them, you can
  "watch" the (railsbridge/ops https://github.com/railsbridge/ops)
  repo and comment on any issues you're interested in helping out with. You
  can also open a new issue and tag it with "idea" if you have a project idea
  you want to propose to the team.

[image: ✨] [image: ❤️]

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#4 (comment).

Alex Chaffee - alex@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://codelikethis.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

[jcaudle]

I was in the middle of a move during the call, but I'm finally settled down and can definitely help out. I'd love to be added to the slack organization and look forward to seeing how the Ops team develops.

[lilliealbert]

@jcaudle sure, is joseph@josephcaudle.com the right email for the slack invite?

[jcaudle]

@lilliealbert that's perfect 😃