Skip to content

Work Log - 2026-07-21

🎯 Focus for Today

  • Onboarding our first volunteer — repo, issues, and first steps

✅ What Got Done

Created volunteers-opsdevnz, a new public GitHub repo for the volunteer landing page and contributor onboarding docs. Seeded it with the governance layer from our module template — LICENSE, Code of Conduct, CONTRIBUTING (commit signing + AI-assisted contribution policy), SECURITY, CODEOWNERS, and an AGENTS.md adapted for a static site. Branch protection on main enforces the workflow from day one: pull requests required, signed commits required.

Opened two starter issues labelled good first issue — scaffolding the landing page, and drafting the onboarding outline — and assigned them to the volunteer after sending his collaborator invite. Background and discussion are on work item #11.

Also jumped on a quick call with Colin about DevOpsDays — only 15 minutes, but the main takeaway was that the event needs a theme. In the DevOpsNZ DevOpsDays Slack we're weighing up ideas: "revival", "Is DevOps Dead?", and perhaps an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons theme — fitting, since D&D has seen a revival of its own lately after Stranger Things made it popular again.

🧠 Notes & Reflections

Our first volunteer found us through the DevOpsNZ Slack. The onboarding path right now is simply: join the Slack, have a conversation with me. I quite enjoyed that conversation and getting to know him — and now we're working together to understand and document the onboarding process itself, since he's helping design it as he walks through it. That's the second starter issue.

We are blanketing him with information at the moment — new repo, assigned issues, commit-signing docs — so I don't want to overload him with more just yet. One thing still to mention when he's settled: time tracking on the GitLab issue. We record volunteer time as in-kind contributions; we value contributions like these, and tracking them lets us measure how much value the project is generating.

Dropped the "Token Burn" section from the worklog template — the end-of-month blog post will cover how we're using OpenCode instead, with graphs of our token usage.

Software Freedom Day planning

Setup my cookie order, it's going to cost $250 for 50 cookies, every attendee gets one :)

3/50 $0 tickets sold so far :)

We'll need to find a sponsor for catering which will likely be Dominoes Pizza and St Pierres sushi. Shouldn't be too much, $300?

Also looking to bring on a professional facilitator ~ $400 we will see.

I think 1k is a reasonable budget for the event.

Trialing the bank-transfer donation flow

Made a $100 donation to the DevOpsDays Wellington 2027 project via its OpenCollective page, deliberately choosing the bank-transfer payment option — skipping Stripe (and its fees) entirely. The transfer landed in the ANZ account the same afternoon, referenced with the OC order id, which makes matching it up pleasantly boring.

Now reconciling it end to end: confirm the pending contribution in OpenCollective (host admin step), then fetch and import the bank line into Beancount via the Akahu pipeline, classify it against the project liability, and pin a balance assertion. If this flow proves out, it's our cheapest and most transparent donation path.

Fetch command for the record (run from the ledger repo root):

uv run akahu transactions acc_cmqeo4cct018302l5d5jkgbua \
  --start 2026-06-30T00:00:00Z --end 2026-07-21T23:59:59Z

(First attempt failed: the runbook still said python -m akahu, but the client has since been packaged as akahu-opsdevnz with an akahu CLI. The ledger repo now declares it as a path dependency and the runbooks are updated to match — small casualties of progress.)

⏳ Mañana

  • Once the volunteer has found his feet: mention time tracking (in-kind contributions) on the work item (mentioned in slack)
  • volunteers.opsdev.nz DNS via OctoDNS, once the site is live on GitHub Pages
  • Rerun the DevOpsDays donation reconciliation — re-fetch via Akahu (today's fetch predated the $100 posting; Akahu connection refresh lags up to ~24h), then import, classify against the project liability, balance assertion