Some of you have caught up with what I’m up to these days via Twitter, others I’ve chatted to personally, but there may some folks out there who don’t actually know what I’m doing, and that’s entirely my fault.
Back in October, I think it was, I made the decision to step away from day-to-day SharePoint contract work in order to work with my good friends Kyle and Robin Gomboy on the ReactionGrid project. I’ve worked with Kyle and Robin for over a year now, first on Second Life, and more recently on OpenSim-based 3D virtual worlds. Together, we hosted the Heroes Happen Here event on Microsoft Island on Second Life, and we spent a long time reminding people that a virtual environment is not the same as a physical world environment, pointing out the potential of data visualisation, virtual collaboration and more – and then we started investigating the potential of OpenSim as a platform for making that happen and were amazed at how evolved it was.
Since that point, ReactionGrid has launched, and we now host a grid with around 76 regions, we have people joining the grid daily with fascinating and interesting projects. Seeing the potential of the platform, believing in the possibilities, and enthusing about it gave me so much more excitement and focus than in any part of my day job, and I came to the conclusion that I needed to put myself into this project as much as possible and see what could come from it. There is a real buzz and excitement around the grid, and some really interesting minds are involved in the project already. There’s nowhere else I would rather be right now than part of this project, because with so many interesting and intelligent people involved, this feels like the right place to be. As of January 1st this year, it was official – the three of us are equal partners in the ReactionGrid project. We all deal with slightly different aspects of the grid, but between the three of us we have a broad skillset that is absolutely necessary to get a grid of this size up and running smoothly, and get people in to the grid to make it so much more than a bunch of virtual land.
I spend my days doing all sorts of things – I have Visual Studio open all the time to look at OpenSim code, figure out what’s going on, and why the code is behaving oddly – and I can’t possibly say that I understand even half of how it works in any detail because it really is a vast project. I’ve concentrated my efforts, for the most part, on the SQL Server side of OpenSim, patching and improving the code there where I can, but that hasn’t stopped me from looking into other areas, investigating some interesting code, and submitting some other patches that have nothing to do with the data layer.
My main focus has been on making it possible to manage a large OpenSim grid. The main web interface for most OpenSim grids is MySQL-specific, so I have worked on a toolset incrementally based on what I know would make our lives as grid managers easier. The three of us now get alerted when new regions are added, when owners are changed – we live thousands of miles apart, so anything that helps spread the day-to-day news without IM overload is essential to us.
We only actually met together once, back in April last year, for a total of about 4 hours. When I mention this to people, many are baffled, but when you work in an environment such as this you can start to understand. We are in constant contact via IM, virtually on our grid, we interact all the time, we know each other well, having spent so much time talking to each other, working together - we are truly good friends, though it is a shame we are separated by that pesky Atlantic ocean!
So, that’s what I’m up to – I have a ReactionGrid blog for grid-related blogging, so if you are interested in that side of my life, head to the Ninja blog on the ReactionGrid site. I’m not leaving this blog, but I do use Twitter a lot these days, so if you are Twitter-enabled, follow dstrawberrygirl for my random ramblings! That’s probably the main reason why my blog has been silent all this long time :)