> I would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with Django.
But Mercurial itself wasn't (although it was written mostly in Python). I think this is a good example of taking the pragmatic choice (GitHub) over the ideological choice (Bitbucket).
That's mostly irrelevant. A lot of people are not using Github just because it supports git - the network effect is one of the key drivers in choosing Github.
is it really valuable to keep the svn repository up for scripts that do automatic updating? since nothing further will ever be pushed to it, those scripts are now tracking an increasingly out-of-date repo.
the other point of view is that there are servers that the admin has had a reasonable expectation of being able to set up and let run itself, but those servers shouldn't be pulling from anyone's svn repo anyway.
Actually I checked with the dictionary before posting, because I had that same concern. (I was a newspaper copyeditor for a while.) Postmortem can mean "any analysis following an event." It's not just for death.
Definitions notwithstanding, I tend to prefer the term 'AAR' (After Action Report). I had a manager in an early campus IT job that had been in the Marines, and he enforced a strict mandatory-AAR policy for anything even remotely complex.
It's really a fantastic idea and something I fully intend to use in every capacity that makes sense going forward. It doesn't make much sense as part of the software design flow, but it absolutely could (and probably should) be a tool in any deployment protocol.
My AARs usually read pretty much like this blog post, more or less to the T, although we emphasized what we would do differently in the future more.
Yeah, I think it's an excellent practice. I get the metaphorical use of "postmortem", but think "after-action report" (for the document) and "retrospective" (for the meeting) better capture the flavor of what a good one looks like. And like you, I think the most valuable part is what to do differently next time.
The way I work them into the software design flow is just to do them regularly, with varying granularity. We do one every Friday afternoon with beers for the last 30-60 minutes of the day.
Normally we discuss whatever interests us most about the week past. But a couple of weeks ago one of the engineers suggested we do one covering the whole year, and it was great. Lots of interesting observations.
Still arguably there's an unhappy connotation, which is better avoided in cases involving any controversy. TBH I first thought something went wrong during transition to GitHub when noticed the headline on HN.
However, I never did professional copy editing, and indeed it's a nitpick compared to the occasion. Great news and hopefully this will help Django development.
>It's probably my non-native English then. I didn't realize it's such a common wording, thanks for pointing out. Just sounded a bit odd.
A, no problem. I'm a non-native English speaker myself. It's so known a use that it's even in the dictionary:
Post Mortem: 2. Informal An analysis or review of a finished event.
Funny aside: in my language we have a similar half-joking phrase.
When someone asks "How did it go?" after you've done anything that you're uncertain about it's outcome (a job interview, exams, your book getting published, etc), a common answer is "The autopsy will show us".
I know that saying. Either the joke exists in several languages or we share one. =)
However, I still generally avoid using that joke with sensitive/more formal matter, preferring to err on the safe side. (Here, as well, misunderstanding might've occurred because the context was a bit less formal than I expected.)
I didn't pay much attention to dictionary references in this thread because I don't trust dictionary much when specific word's usage is in question, more relying on personal experience. Although maybe I should simply get a more extensive dictionary than what ships with OS X—the big problem with the above approach, of course, is that if I never saw a phrase used in some way, it may only mean I never had a chance to.
