Mid-October 2022 on vAMSYS

[Lukas Jankauskas]

6 months ago...

Let's say goodbye with a smile, dear
Just for a while dear we must part
Don't let this parting upset you
I'll not forget you, sweetheart

We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again some sunny day

Above is for the fans of Vera Lynn and We'll Meet Again.

So we do - on a sunny day. In London. Who would have thought.

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Since the last update

In the last 6 months we've:

Update vAMSYS AIRAC data 6 times

Made 134 code commits
Wrote 76,128 lines of code
Deleted 27,672 lines of code

Resolved 52 Bugzilla entries
Are still working on 8 Bugzilla entries

Resolved 249 Support tickets

Had 22 outage incidents ranging from <1 minute to 49 minutes

Huge thanks to Chris, Steve and Matt for their help! 

What big things have you missed?

Matt joined vAMSYS Support team!
Peter joined vAMSYS team!
stats.js script was released
George and Anna left vAMSYS Team
Various noteworthy updates

 

So not much has happened in 6 months?

Yes - that's pretty much correct. It has been business pretty much as usual since the last 6 months - did we do all we wanted to? No. Has vAMSYS Disappeared? No. Are we done? Heck no.

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With the summer ending and the travel peak coming to snooze, my time starts to open up. For those of you who do not know - Hello, I'm Lukas! - I work within accommodation industry and summer time is crazy time in London - and summer time peak (thanks Covid!) came in very early this year and lasted longer than ever. Lots of work and often very long hours, not to mention some very difficult to deal with people - but that is being forgotten as we move on with the time. Good news - I am getting less busy. Which means I can do some vAMSYS work at work and when I get back home I do not have the incling to make friends with a 9 gauge, which means I can also do more when I am at home.

Work has kept me very busy since the last update - but as I hope you can see above - vAMSYS was far from forgotten. In fact, we were quite productive if you take the limits into consideration and allow us to have some leisure time 🙂

I am also happy to say that Chris has seen an upgrade in his powers and can better react to events should one plague vAMSYS. For certain types of common events or support requests - there is now Chris, George and I who can deal with, not to mention the things Steve and Matt can do. 

Generally speaking, we are now moving into peak vAMSYS season - as I generally tend to do towards the end of the year.

So - what can you look forward to?

 

I've been working on Orwell update for a while - it has been a good training ground for me to get to know the tools which will replace the old ways of doing things without impacting a huge number of people. I would think it went well - in alphabetical order, these are the only pages left to be updated on Orwell:

• Claim Review 
• Event Management 
• Forum Management 
• Pilot Invites
• Pilot Sharing Agreements 
• PIREP comment presets 
• PIREP point presets 
• PIREP Review 
• PIREP Scorers 

Some of them are quick and easy - others - cause me dread when I think of them, as they would result days or weeks of work. They will get done, but I think more value will be made if I refocus my attention to something else.

 

vAMSYS Sundays

Whilst I strongly believe that most of Team vAMSYS (that's Chris, George, Matt, Steve and I) are plenty accessible on Discord, emails and support tickets - I can understand how some of you feel otherwise - especially when it comes to me and the forward movement of vAMSYS Platform in general.

With that in mind, for a few months, I would like to trial what I call vAMSYS Sundays.

Every Sunday, between 16:00 and 18:00 UK time you will find me in the #Stage voice room on vAMSYS NOTAMS Discord under the  category of vAMSYS Sunday:

I will have my audio plugged in and you will see one of my screens whilst I work on vAMSYS - it may be tickets, bug fixes or features - whatever is more important on that particular occasion. Don't feel the urge to talk to me or say anything - you are more than welcome to observe and listen to me and the sounds of my household going nuts as they usually tend to do 😄

This ought to enable you to interact with me directly in AMA (ask me anything) type of setting both on voice or in #stage-chat discord in text. The purpose is to give you a much easier way for you to connect with me, ask questions and get quick answers.

For anything more serious or more involved, if I cannot give immediate answer, I must caveat - I am a human Dory - you will be asked to submit a ticket or post a bug on bugzilla so I can get back to you.

vAMSYS Sundays are open to Team vAMSYS, VA Staff and VA Owners on vAMSYS NOTAMs Discord. 

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Your input required for VDS future

I hope you will find this section much more exciting.

I'm gonna pick up from above - there is still a fraction of Orwell work to do - some of the pages are very easy, others - I do not want to touch unless I have to.

I was perusing error logs, server logs, discord messages and support tickets - one thing was obvious - Orwell works - VDS doesn't.

VDS is old and I cannot remember the last time it received a significant update. I'm not saying I am pausing or stopping Orwell update - not at all - the todo list of Orwell is a known quantity and I know what I want to do and (more importantly) how to do it - it will get done.

However, I want to start focusing on VDS. Over the years it got extremely neglected and is starting to show it's age (VDS v2 came out 3 or 4 years ago?). Not only is it slow and negatively impacts rest of vAMSYS, it is not friendly.

This is where you, dear VA Owner or Staff come in - back in the day when VDS was written, I was fresh with my recently acquired knowledge of what it takes to update routes for 3 VAs. Way back then, VDS was written to my needs to do things as I would do it in a way which made most sense.

Over the last 4 years or more the operational knowledge is now lost on me - hence I am going to ask you to tell me - what does VDS need to do to work for you?

There are some things I want to do - and I think we will find common ground on those:

• No more Pairs
  Pairs are basically an abstraction layer. We can eliminate it - you can have start/end dates (and times!) on routes instead of pairs. 
  Obviously, more thinking needs to be done about how could we do (or not) the empty routes of the past as well as transfer flights. The idea flying around right now is - if you want a placeholder route - you enter it. If you want two airports to have transfer flight - you enter it. Which ties in to:
• No more 9900s
  See above - with no pairs, we do not need to invent them. You can create them like regular routes and put whatever route/callsign/aircraft you want
• No areas
  Well - not really, but in a way. Lemme know if you use areas a lot and how you use them. My thinking is - areas are a 'thing' right now, it needs to be a 'preset'. More on that here:
• Granular staff control
  No more adding VDS staff in VDS. All staff management to move to Orwell. In VDS - each manager can be individually assigned airports they are responsible for (or assign preset group of airports or 'area')
• Airports in more than one area
  Just as it says on the tin - one airport, multiple 'areas' with callsign limiting.

In terms of fundamental VDS changes - those are my big ones. 

In this forum post linked - please let me know what you think and - more importantly - what functional changes would you like to see:

I hope to start work on VDS at the earliest and focus my time on it - with remaining Orwell pages filling in the gaps where I do not have long enough time for VDS on that particular day or hour.

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These monthly updates take a considerable amount of time! I started writing this at 19:30 UK time; this post got published almost 2.5 hours later. Time I maybe could have spent doing something else? Is this the best way I could spend my time? Please let me know!

[Jan Podlipský]

Hi Lukas!

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to write this update. I am so sorry for forcing you to write them, however, I feel that zero updates are just as bad. Maybe you don't have to write such an extensive updates and just write something shorter and more to the point? I think everyone will agree with me that we do not require a 500 word essay. It could easily just be "during the last month, I have done this, I expect this to happen during the next month"

If not anything else, I think that those vAMSYS Sundays are an excellent idea, and even if this should be the only thing keeping us in the loop, it's still enough.