[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindumps on things Mel Chua has found shiny lately.

FAWN and the raptor/bus test

I wanted to call out this conversation between Kamisamanou Burgess, Karsten Wade, and Neville Cross on the Fedora News list because it’s a great illustration of the Raptor/Bus test – “if you get hit by a raptor or eaten by a bus, your project should still survive.”

Kamisamanou is the creator and sole maintainer of FAWN (Fedora Audio Weekly News), a podcast of FWN (Fedora Weekly News), and announced a temporary hiatus due to school obligations. Karsten replied, noting that when the same thing had happened to FWN itself, it led not to a pause, but to an explosion of contributors.

Originally and for a long while, Fedora Weekly News was many things done by a handful of people on a stand-alone server  separated from Fedora infrastructure.  As those people’s lives changed and they moved on to other things, Thomas Chung stayed with producing FWN.  He had an insight, a brilliant move, and saw that by bringing FWN in to Fedora as a sub-project he could create room for capacity.  The modern FWN system with beats was born from that.

Creating capacity is something Fedora does best, or at least tries to, and especially for contributors.  It worked for Thomas, allowing him to share the load initially, and later to let his brainchild out of the nest to be a living, breathing part of Fedora.

Then Neville chimes in with a brief +1, and… well, that’s the saga so far. Anyone interested in lifting up this podcast with more hands in the same way?

On a side note: one of my favorite things about reading Planets is the accidental learning I pick up along the way. This is harder for me to get in person, since my hearing makes it difficult to randomly pick up on conversations that aren’t directly addressed to me, but when reading blogs (and lists and IRC logs), I catch words and go “oh, what’s that?” and sometimes I learn stuff. Today’s discoveries: urlwatch and tee.