App Engine Weekly Community Update #1

[Johan Euphrosine]

*App Engine Weekly Community Update #1*

Dear App Engine Community,

As discussed on IRC, each week I will bring some news and metrics
about the App Engine community activity.

Thanks a lot to +Rodrigo Moraes for reviewing this with his sharp
journalist eyes.

*Highlights*

1.5.2 Release Notes
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/07/app-engine-152-sdk-released.html

Postmortem: Java App Engine outage, July 14, 2011
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/07/postmortem-java-app-engine-outage-july.html

Go for App Engine is now generally available
http://blog.golang.org/2011/07/go-for-app-engine-is-now-generally.html

Tipfy is looking for a new maintainer
http://groups.google.com/group/tipfy/browse_thread/thread/1359e76c69e89060

*Hot questions*

Flask vs webapp2 for Google App Engine
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6774371/flask-vs-webapp2-for-google-app-engine

Bad Performance for Dedupe of 2 million records using mapreduce on Appengine
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6770781/bad-performance-for-dedupe-of-2-million-records-using-mapreduce-on-appengine

What is the best way of describing day of week?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6763623/what-is-the-best-way-of-describing-day-of-week

*IRC and Hangouts*

IRC Office Hours on Wednesday, transcript there:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/ZzUDaN226bU/discussion

+Guido van Rossum and +Ikai Lan held community hangouts and posted
some followup on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/115212051037621986145/posts/TmU4Sdx7yT3
https://plus.google.com/u/1/107011265359512082824/posts/42G7ZiXkAtR

*1:1 with one member of the App Engine team*

Who?
Sumit Arora aka sumeets@, I'm with the App Engine SRE team

What?
As SRE, our mission is to balance availability, reliability and
performance with agility of our services.
Which essentially means: we work on developing and deploying systems
that help us measure availability and reliability; monitor outages or
degradation of service as well as capacity planning.
In addition, we gatekeep all changes going to our production
infrastructure, to ensure changes are rolled out without impacting end
users

Where?
I work out of the Sydney Australia Office.

When?
I've been with this team for about 6 months now.

Why?
I'm passionate about the cloud computing domain in general... and App
Engine represents a pioneer in the that domain, because it gives
developers the means to spend their time where it matters the most,
i.e. developing applications and not worrying about infrastructure to
run it on

Emacs or Vi?
vi

Python, Java or Go?
Python and Java In that order. I will use python over java any day
mostly because of my sysadmin background. And I’m just getting started
with Go.

Recommended App Engine framework, library or tool ?
Django, without a doubt.

Fun thought?
I find it very ironic and amusing that every time a smoke detector
goes off, the first thing people want to do is fix the smoke detector.
There is nothing wrong with it, it's doing what its supposed to be
doing... Fix the fire instead! Sadly this is true of monitoring and
alerting as well, in large.

*Issue tracking*

47 new issues were reported in the public issue tracker:

- 31 Defects
- 10 Production issues
- 6 Feature request
- 20 were Acknowledged and still need to be reproduced
- 10 have been Accepted and escalated to the Engineer team when necessary
- 17 of those issues were not actionable (Invalid, WontFix or Duplicate)

19 issues (including 8 from this week) have been fixed.

All the Productions issues backlog (68 issues) has been triaged, and
the New queue for Production issue is now empty.

*Groups*

[appengine-python]
115 messages in 25 threads
64 % of posts answered within 2 days
Top Posters:
- robert.kluin (9)
- proppy (7)
- ninjin32 (7)

[appengine-java]
177 messages in 51 threads
43% of posts answered within 2 days
Top Posters:
- ikai (11)
- venugopal.vassiredy (6)
- durant.didier (4)

[appengine]
330 messages in 84 threads
61% of posts answered within 2 days
Top Posters:
- robert.kluin (20)
- proppy (16)
- jeff (7)

Feedbacks are welcome on this new format, let me know what you are
looking forward to see in next week App Engine Community Update.
--
Johan Euphrosine (proppy)
Developer Programs Engineer
Google Developer Relations

[Joshua Smith]

61% of posts answered within 2 days

1. I am glad that you are tracking this.

2. That's NOT a good percentage. Since this is your main support channel, this should be 99.995% in 1 day. I'm not kidding. If you want to be in the software business, walk the walk.

3. I'm skeptical about your measurement technique. "Answered" doesn't mean answered unless the problem is actually resolved. The pattern I usually see is:

- I post a question

- You ask for some more information

- I provide that information

- Crickets.

My bet is that you are counting that as "answered" since you responded to the initial question.  But it ain't answered in the stack overflow sense of the word. And that sense is all that matters.

Let's hope that when you come out of preview and start charging us all that money, you step it up a bit on the support side. I know that customer support has about negative priority at google, so I recognize that it will be a challenge.

-Joshua

[Johan Euphrosine]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Joshua Smith <Joshua...@charter.net> wrote:
>

Hi Joshua,

> 61% of posts answered within 2 days
>
> 1. I am glad that you are tracking this.

I'm glad that you find interest into those metrics.

> 2. That's NOT a good percentage. Since this is your main support channel,
> this should be 99.995% in 1 day. I'm not kidding. If you want to be in the
> software business, walk the walk.

The purpose of the groups is for App Engine developer to help each
others, as per the group description:
"""
Discussion group for Google App Engine. For Python-only dialog, see
the Python group, same goes for Java. Also see Downtime Notify for
maintenance info. API Gurus: experienced developers who watch this
group, answering questions & providing valuable feedback: Geoffrey
(Wooble) Spear & Robert Kluin
"""

And the purpose of this metrics was to measure level of engagement and
reactivity of the community as a whole (not only Googler) in the
different threads.

> 3. I'm skeptical about your measurement technique. "Answered" doesn't mean
> answered unless the problem is actually resolved. The pattern I usually see
> is:
> - I post a question
> - You ask for some more information
> - I provide that information
> - Crickets.
> My bet is that you are counting that as "answered" since you responded to
> the initial question.  But it ain't answered in the stack overflow sense of
> the word. And that sense is all that matters.

I'd love to track the actual resolution of questions but we miss
metadata to check if a question has been answered.

Maybe we (as the community) can agree on some convention were we use
nickname++ people as a signal of the question of the current thread
being answered, or we (community) can decide to shift those question
to Stack Overflow and keep the group for more casual discussion.

I'd love to hear what others think about that.

> Let's hope that when you come out of preview and start charging us all that
> money, you step it up a bit on the support side. I know that customer
> support has about negative priority at google, so I recognize that it will
> be a challenge.

If you take a look a the new pricing model we announced:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html

You will notice that we mention SLA and Operational support for Paid
and Premium app, which is a strong indicator that we are serious about
this.

[Jay]

This is a really great summary, a nice service Johan. Thank you for taking the time. 

I missed the IRC discussion. I'm sure one of the things discussed there was something about the best way to publish this. Obviously this group is a must. I'm trying to figure out a way where I can get this topic "Weekly Community Update" in email or rss. Anyone have any ideas?

-- Jay

[Rodrigo Moraes]

Hi Jay,

This was also posted on Google Plus:

https://plus.google.com/111042085517496880918/posts/exjJoZwygq1

Until there're brand pages on g+, and then the weekly update could be posted on a 'App Engine' profile, you can follow Johan using the link above.

-- rodrigo

[Barry Hunter]

Maybe a Google "Alert" for

site:groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/ intitle:"App Engine
Weekly Community Update"

http://www.google.com/alerts/

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[Geoffrey Spear]

On Jul 22, 10:34 am, Johan Euphrosine <pro...@google.com> wrote:
> I'd love to track the actual resolution of questions but we miss
> metadata to check if a question has been answered.
>
> Maybe we (as the community) can agree on some convention were we use
> nickname++ people as a signal of the question of the current thread
> being answered, or we (community) can decide to shift those question
> to Stack Overflow and keep the group for more casual discussion.

Since you mention StackOverflow and linked to some interesting
questions in the update, I wonder if anyone with http://data.stackexchange.com
skills could produce similar metrics from the google-app-engine tag on
SO.

[steuke]

Johan,

this new format is an excellent idea! Thanks for providing this stuff.
It's really a great way to stay on top of things going on around app
engine development. I like the 1:1 as well as the stats about the
groups. I wonder why the Java group has such a low percentage compared
to the others. Are Java-developers not helping each other as much? ;)
Note toe self: We should change that…

Again, thanks and keep it coming!
Best,
Stefan

[steuke]

[Johan Euphrosine]

Checked it out for next community update, but the data is only updated
monthly :(