I don’t often blog here about work, mainly because

1. It’s not (at the moment) open source (it will be come July, never you fear).
2. The people who aren’t reading this blog for open source-related stuff (which to be fair is probably a reasonably high proportion; after all I’ve done a lot of photography and rant-blogging over the last six months or so) don’t really care.
3. When I do blog about Launchpad I do it over at the Launchpad blog.

But the last two Launchpad development cycles have been particularly awesome for the Launchpad Bugs team. We’ve got a set of goals for Launchpad 3.0 (the version which is going to be open sourced in July) and until January-ish we weren’t doing hugely well at getting them done. There’s a lot of work to do in Launchpad at the best of times; sometimes other concerns get in the way and the stuff you wanted to get done this cycle because it’s targeted to the next major release gets pushed out by critical bugs or long-standing bugs or some other thing which occupies your time.

But at the start of our February development cycle our estimable team leader, Bjorn Tillenius wrote a script that would take our list of goals, subdivided by user story and turn it into a wiki page. The effect has been awesome, and this cycle we’ve managed to get so much done that we’ve pretty much blown the socks off our own and everyone else’s expectations.

Gavin and I have done a huge amount of work on getting bug activity logs working properly (with a little more to come next cycle to make things really, really awesome); Tom and Abel have done masses of work on official bug tags and Michael, who’s actually nominally a member of the Soyuz team, for which we’ll forgive him, has worked really hard to add one of the first bits of javascripty coolness to the bug tracker, with the excellent new "mark as duplicate" functionality.

Cycles like this remind me of why I do this job: the software is great and getting better all the time, the company is fantastic and is easily the best employer I’ve ever had and the people I work with are some of the smartest, coolest, craziest froods I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks, guys. I see no reason why next cycle can’t be even more awesome than this one.

(Your usual programme of ranting and photography will return shortly.)