Please welcome our new Style Leader: Nikki

The MusicBrainz Style Leader has a really hard job — this position requires people to to have a thick skin, a deep understanding of MusicBrainz and the patience of a saint. Its a really challenging job! And because of this, people burn out fast and generally abandon their jobs after a while. This has been the pattern for many years for us and its been very frustrating. And now its has happened again: Brian, the Style Leader up til today, has not been responding to me. I’ve not heard anything from him in weeks.

In an effort to try and break out of this cycle, I am going start a new experiment: Make the Style Leader a paid position.

While we have some money in the bank, its not massive amounts of money and the pay for this position reflects just that. Its not a whole lot of money, but I am hoping its enough money to offset the pain of being the Style Leader and will keep the Style Leader engaged over a longer period. With that in mind, I am proud to announce that Nikki will be our next Style Leader and our first paid Style Leader.

Nikki has been tasked to ensure that the style process moves along and is properly documented. Her goal is to drive consensus among the brainerz who participate in the important Style process and to keep proposals on track. Once a proposal’s RFC/RFV periods are up, its Nikki’s job to ensure that the proposal is acted upon by the appropriate people. She should also help to keep the style process evolving as the MusicBrainz style needs evolve.

Thank you for all your hard work Brian! I look forward to working with you more closely Nikki!

BTW: Warp will still be involved in helping Nikki lead the style process, but his focus is on NGS for the time being. We’re very much dedicated to staying focused on delivering NGS as soon as we can.

Next NGS milestone: Beta 3 on 7 September

After a 3 hour bug triage session with the team we’ve managed to sort out the bugs and come up with a schedule for the next release. After looking at the number of bugs for us to tackle before the release, we felt that we really needed to have one more beta release before we are ready to call it a release candidate. Given that, we’re going to do yet one more more beta release on 7 September.

I know, another beta release? Yes, we’re sorry that this is stretching out longer than it should have, but we’re dedicated to releasing the software when its ready and not before. We’ve done our best to cut out unnecessary features, but we still have about 8 weeks of work to do. Fortunately, both Oliver and Warp are now working full time and and fully focused on this release. Re-writing a 10 year old codebase isn’t an easy thing to do and so far it looks like NGS will become stable before perl6 does. 🙂

The release candidate 1 will be 100% feature complete with no new features or tweaks being added. All we will do to the release candidate is fix bugs! For this reason we are not creating an NGS release milestone in Jira. That way, no one can postpone any tickets into the final release. 🙂

To see what we have planned for the upcoming releases, please take a look at the bug list for beta 3 and the bug list for release candidate 1. Currently we expect release candidate 1 (and hopefully only 1) about 4 weeks after beta 3. We hope to then release NGS onto the servers 2-4 weeks after that.

Looking for a contract programmer for C++/Python work

UPDATE: This position has been filled.

A soon-to-be partner of MusicBrainz is looking for an engineer for contract work. This company is looking for a person who has the following skills:

  1. Strong Python and C++ skills with experience in building applications on Windows, Linux and Mac.
  2. Open source programming experience
  3. Server programming skills a plus
  4. Solr and audio programming experience a plus
  5. Ability to be a self starter, handle task coordination via Skype and IRC.

The work would involve working with MusicBrainz and the partner company. This contract would be full time for 2-5 months, depending on the workload which isn’t very clear yet. After that the contract would taper off to 10-20 hours per week on an ongoing basis. Depending on how main portion of the contract goes, the company may decide to give more hours to the contractor on new projects. The pay for this position is still being determined, but its safe to assume that it would be a fair rate for an engineer based in the US. This engineer can be located anywhere, but the pay is likely to be appropriate for US rates. If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to helpwanted at musicbrainz dot org.

Downtime: Adding more RAM to our DB server

As a band-aid measure we’re going to add another 4GB of ram to our database server. This should hold us over until we migrate to NGS, when this problem should go away. In order to add more RAM to the DB server, I’m expecting a down time of about 10 minutes starting at 14:00 PDT, 17:00EDT, 22:00UK, 23:00 Europe this Friday July 30.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Server has been fed an additional 4GB ram and everything is back to normal. Let’s hope this helps the load on the database server.

VLC, we love you, but we're seeing too much of you!

Dear VLC:

In the last month you grew to more than 25% of our traffic and this is hard for us to handle. We’ve limited the number of requests from VLC to 100 requests per 10 seconds. We need to find a way to help cover our costs for all of this traffic.

In other words, we need to sit down and chat, VLC. Please contact us!

Respectfully,

MusicBrainz

Please take the MusicBrainz Survey!

Jess Hemerly, who is has been studying MusicBrainz as part of a class at UC Berkeley, has devised a survey for MusicBrainz users to get a better understanding of who contributes to MusicBrainz and why. She says:

I’m a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a MusicBrainz editor (agreatnotion). I’m interested in how and why people contribute to MusicBrainz and how it can be better. Your participation will help us learn more about you, our community, and how to sustain a successful peer-produced database. The survey takes about 15 minutes, and all personal information—like username and email—will remain confidential. My advisor and I will review and analyze the results and hope to share our analysis with the academic and open source communities. The results will also be made available to the MusicBrainz community.

Take the survey here. The survey will be open for two weeks, until July 23, 2010.

Thank you for participating!