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Work Log - 2026-07-19

🎯 Focus for Today

  • To go outside

✅ What Got Done

Roughly four hours of general admin work — planning for Software Freedom Day and reconciling some MRs and PRs I've left dangling the past few days.

🧠 Notes & Reflections

Sent out thank-you emails to core collaborators so far on SFD2026 and invited a few more people I know to participate.

Sketched out some ideas about our "Cathedral and Bazaar" style event, with a few talks in the morning and breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Set up a "Humanitix" account, and will ask people to register for the event using this ticket system. Also considering Pretix, but the pretix.eu domain sort of puts me off. Not that it should — EU-based services are known for good data stewardship — but Humanitix appeals to me.

Speaking of decisions, it seems like OpsDev.nz should start a decision record of its own soon. The relationship between StartMeUp.nz and OpsDev.nz is a bit muddled right now, but we will be working on the disentanglement process going forward. There will always be that close relationship between the two, and if you're reading this and wondering what the diff is — think SMUNZ as governance and OpsDev.nz as delivery, is probably the easiest way to understand it.

OpsDev.nz is onboard right now to deliver some basic infrastructure for SMUNZ to do what it needs to do, this is called the "RAMP" project.

Once that is delivered, OpsDev.nz will focus on continually improving what it has delivered for SMUNZ and focus on developing other collectives to support. These could be community events like Software Freedom Day and DevOpsDays, the aim is to spin them off into their own collectives.

Since they are both community events related to the FOSS world we support, one idea is to develop a collective that focuses on these events, apart from OpsDev.nz, though perhaps these projects are fine to be homed with our collective? We don't know the answer to this yet.

I'll just say this, OpsDev.nz sees itself as a platform engineering collective, developing and sustaining some Open Source modules and potentially spinning out products and services, first as their own collectives but potentially beyond that as their own companies or business units.

We also see ourselves as a research and development lab, where we are evaluating tools and processes and seeing what works. We are looking into a few research areas, one of which is using the FleetDM service and either developing an MSP or partnering with an existing one to provide a device management service. It's something we will need ourselves, so we will certainly dog food it — using the service ourselves and supporting the use of it as a service.

To tie a few of these threads together, SMUNZ is working on a high-level blog post covering how we are using LLMs and building agents, what the RAMP project is actually about, and the latest developments in Software Freedom Day planning. The post tries to make the relationship between SMUNZ as fiscal host and OpsDev.nz as a pilot, a sort of internal/external platform engineering collective, legible, and to explain why we are framing the current work as a "revival". These events are not new; we are reviving Software Freedom Day and DevOpsDays for Wellington. The post itself has been backlogged a bit by other work and maintenance on the modules, but we are aiming to publish it at the end of the month. We may put out a separate SFD2026 announcement before then, or around the same time. Working on it.

The other area we are looking into currently is agentic workflows, like everyone else, we have very briefly evaluated the BMAD framework based on a recommendation, and realised it's not exactly for us but we are thinking along similar lines. Incubating another project based on this, not sure if it will see the light of day yet.

⏳ Mañana

  • Skunkworks session on the device management research project (FleetDM MSP path)
  • Resume the RAMP sprint

🔥 Token Burn