Glider Awards – 1st edition – August 2006

Negonation is pleased to announce the creation of cash prizes to reward our collaborators’ efforts.

What are the Glider Awards?

They are awards that Negonation will give to its most valuable collaborators.
The “most valuable collaborators” are those who, according to their peers, contribute most to meeting our milestone and sharing knowledge with their colleagues. On this occasion, three prizes of 1,000 euros each will be given. Two of the prizes (2 x 1,000 euros) will depend on the collaborators’ votes and the other one (1 x 1,000 euros) on the Negonation employees’ votes.

Where does the name come from?

Eric Raymond, proposed the use of this emblem to identify hackerdom.

hacker emblem

In Conway’s Game of Life, a glider is the minimum cell pattern with the ability to move. We believe that this perfectly describes what we are: small but agile. At Negonation, we are fanatics of emerging systems where everything is more than the sum of its parts or where, based on simple rules, complex behaviors are achieved.

Who can vote?

All the collaborators who have participated in any way in meeting the milestone. There isn’t a list. You know whether or not you can vote.

Who can receive the award?

Any collaborator, regardless of when they joined the project. Therefore, Negonation employees are excluded.

How are the votes cast?

If you are a collaborator, choose the two people you think most deserve this recognition and email me the names before Sunday 13 August. The decision is final and will be announced on this blog on Monday 14 August.

When are the awards given?

Every time a milestone is met. There are three milestones for 2006:

  1. Tractis Beta – Negotiation and digital signature: 31 July 2006
  2. Tractis Beta – Contract administration: 31 September 2006
  3. Tractis Beta – Dispute resolution: 31 December 2006

By Manolo Santos
Saved in: Announcements, Glider, Tractis | 3 comments » | 8 August 2006

3 comments in “Glider Awards – 1st edition – August 2006”

[...] There’s a cliché which says that only bad systems administrators are known while good ones are invisible for the rest of the team. No-one remembers sysadmins when everything is running smoothly, the only thing you’re concerned with is the person in charge of maintaining servers up-to-date when everything fails. Aware that within a development team there are “invisible men” for the rest of the team, we decided to reserve one of the Glider Awards for Negonation employees in order to compensate them if this were necessary. Interestingly enough, it was not necessary to resort to that option since the collaborators themselves recognized the work of our sysadmin: José Gordo. I am proud to say that it is a pleasure to work with the best sysadmin that I have ever known. I could use all this post to talk about his tasks: server contracts, DNS administration, SSL certificates, software installation, backups, capistrano deployment scripts, security updates, and monitoring of the development and production environments, all of which he does skillfully. But if I had to highlight a single piece of work it would be the fine-tuning of the production server. We had decided to hire a dedicated server with a pre-installed CentOS and we decided to migrate it to the Ubuntu Server. Since we did not have physical access to the server, an operator was needed to intervene. The cost was prohibitive and it did not ensure the desired results, so we decided to transplant the operating system. Basically, José did an open-heart transformation of CentOS into a Ubuntu Server and added RAID support, taking advantage of the server’s two discs. To appreciate the complicated operation, you should take into account the fact that the network environment has to be operational throughout the process: a single fault and we would not be able to enter the machine. Instead of simply crossing his fingers, he installed a replica of the environment of a virtual machine in a computer to which he had physical access and repeated the operation several times until making sure that the technique worked. Finally, the same procedure was made in the production environment in a completely satisfactory way. [...]

[...] First of all I would like to publicly congratulate the winners of the 1st Edition of the Glider Awards: José Luis Gordo, Ernesto Jiménez and Juanse Pérez. Despite our fears, the system has worked. The collaborators chose wisely. It’s difficult to think of people who deserved it more. [...]

[...] At Negonation, every time we complete a milestone we want to reward the efforts of our collaborators. [...]

More posts in Negonation Blog