FAST: the [F]aculty & [A]cademic-Support [S]oftware [T]eam

 

FAST: the [F]aculty & [A]cademic-Support [S]oftware [T]eam

(Yes, the acronym is a stretch)

FAST is a community of practice for staff developers and dev-ops experts at the University of Waterloo. The group exists to help teams of all size develop/maintain better software by increasing cross-departmental communication and trust while sharing best practices and experiences.

Members: Sign in to view meeting notes and other private pages. The link is in the upper-right corner.

Membership

FAST membership is generally limited to individuals who develop, maintain, or support (through dev-ops) software on campus, with a focus on internal tools.

If you’d like to become a member of FAST, contact @Pavol Chvala , @Steve Weber , or @Mirko Vucicevich .

Membership is restricted to full-time Staff and Faculty members participating in internal tool development as part of their employment

Members will have access to:

  • FAST website with the ability to edit projects.

  • developer-level access in the FAST-dev group on git.uwaterloo.ca

  • read/write access to this wiki

  • the FAST team on Microsoft Teams

  • access to the FAST Jira Service Management portal

  • VMs on the FAST infrastructure (WIP)

  • a heightened sense of self-worth and satisfaction

Developer Resources

The following pages are available publicly to all developers on campus! We hope to foster better shared knowledge about developing software on campus.

FAST Website

The FAST Website acts as a public-facing listing of UW-developed / maintained software projects. As a member, we hope you will Log In and enter project information for everybody to see.

To log in use the Admin link. Authentication is done through LDAP using the [----] grouper group.

The intent is to eventually add additional functionality to the website to assist FAST members in developing tools. As of now, the site offers:

  • Versioned Documents: 
    Under each of your projects you can create markdown documents which retain version history, useful for things like agreements

  • Help Button:
    (Changing soon) We have a help button you can add to your website with a simple <script> tag! The button allows your users to quickly email contacts for your project, as well as offers the ability to set up alerts on your website

  • Badge System (under development):
    We're working on a badge system to help developers have a checklist of best or close-to-best practices. The goal is to help highlight projects which are eligible for cross-departmental coverage, as well as to help developers keep track of project health as standards change and evolve on campus.

Monthly Meet

FAST members meet (currently via Microsoft Teams) on the 2nd Tuesday of the month each month. The meet is generally structured as such:

Time

Subject

Time

Subject

10:00am - ???

Lightning Talks & Presentations

??? - 12:00pm

Group Discussions

12:00pm - 1:30pm

Lunch Break (optional in-person lunch @ St. Jerome’s cafeteria)

1:30pm - 4:30pm

Occasional post-meeting development / tutorial / help sessions for interested parties

If you have something you need help with, ask the group if anybody will be available for the after-lunch period of the day, as members will sometimes break off to work together on projects.

The meeting will generally end early in cases where discussions end or nobody has things they need help with in the afternoon.

Teams Chat

The primary communication channel is through Microsoft Teams. Please contact one of the group admins to get added. We occasionally have guest presenters from other parts of Campus.

Members are encouraged to be active in the teams chat, as everybody benefits from active discussion and sharing of ideas and opinions.

GitLab Group

You will get Developer access on all projects in our gitlab group. Projects can be put in this group if they're considered open for anybody in the group to contribute to.

Developer access means individuals can make and push to non-protected branches of projects, as well as create and resolve issues.

Most departments will likely want to keep their projects in their own groups, but can opt to add the FAST group to their projects' members (under whatever permission level they deem appropriate)

GitHub Access

FAST membership comes with automatic access to the University of Waterloo’s GitHub organization, which is used for hosting some projects as well as where globally available Open Source projects should live (for visibility)

Jira Service Management

VM Infrastructure

We hope to eventually provide optional “Dev VM”s to developers wanting a secure place to do active development. This project is currently in-progress

 

 

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