STX Next team support towards next.suttacentral website development

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Dear All.

It is a pleasure to introduce myself to this forum. I am part of the polish development team (STX Next company) that is currently working with Sujato and core SuttaCentral team on developing next.suttacentral website. As Sujato explained to us it might be interesting for you to learn something more about the polish team working currently on the website development. That is why each of us will be happy to add few comments in the forum in the next days. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have about our work.

As an introduction, I will say that we support Sujato project in the team of 4 people: myself (Gosia), 2 developers with front-end and back-end skills (Hubert and Jakub) and one tester (Krzysiek). We work closely with core SuttaCentral team that is Sujato, Blake and Vimala. I will start by introducing myself as my colleagues will introduce themselves to this forum in next few days.

I support the project in a role of product owner. This role is specified in so-called “agile” methodology that we work in (if you are interested more in methodology we work please let me know so I will be happy to share with you all the details). My role is mostly in planning our work in cycles and making sure that requirements for our work are well understood by my team colleagues. In other words, I am making sure all scope of work is captured to detail and clarity needed (closer to development phase areas are being detailed more comparing to those planned for later). In day to day activities I am working with the polish team to split tasks that we work on to ensure full understanding and smooth implementation and I support them in any requirements doubts they might have (collecting the bigger picture from Sujato). In regular cycles I am refreshing roadmap for Sujato so he can know if we are on track with activities we do and I work with Sujato and SC core team to clarify nearest to development areas of work. Last but not least I try to support Sujato in overall website features or functionalities planning by giving some ideas for consideration or options for Sujato final decision.

Overall I might tell this is one of the most exciting projects I have worked in (overall I work on IT projects approximately 9 years). This is due to close work relation that we have with core SuttaCentral team (specific to ways of working we set up under mentioned agile approach) and really smooths and fast (day-to-day) communication regards key areas of work. More than that Core SuttaCentral team is supporting us with their years’ knowledge on website/texts specifics which helps us to concentrate fully on developing task correctly instead of trying to understand 100% text specifics or relations. That kind of approach is the best what we could think of in terms of smooth project implementation.

In case you have any questions please feel free to ask them. I would be happy to answer or support where I can.

Kind regards, Gosia

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Hi Gosia,

Lovely to hear from you, and thanks for letting our community know what you’re up to.

I have learned a tremendous amount from you and from the methods that we’re using. One of the main struggles that we had as a team was figuring out how to organize and structure our process of working together on such a complex, long-term project. You bring a clarity, focus and sense of organization which is much appreciated. So thanks! :clap:

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Welcome and good luck! :smiley: :smiley:

You open source? :nerd_face:

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Thank you so much @Gosia.
We all very much enjoy working with your team and I really don’t mind having meetings at 4 am PST, meeting you all is a great start of my day :smile:

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Welcome! And thank you :slight_smile: . The project is open source as it was from the beginning. We contribute to it here: https://github.com/suttacentral/next-sc

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It is good to hear from you! I hope everything goes smoothly and there is a fantastic product in the end!

Best wishes,

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As of now, we are around the middle point of the project and indeed we start to see how everything nicely works between elements. So hopefully we are in a good way to deliver a product that users will like or love.

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Hello everyone!

I think it’s also time to introduce myself. My name is Krzysiek and I’m a Quality Assurance tester with Graphic Design experience and over 5 years of experience in IT industry. Like Gosia and the developers, we all work at STX Next.

My job is to minimize the risk of unwanted and broken elements during the development process which helps assure that the application works properly. Most of my time is spent verifying applied functionalities and stories at an angle bugs/mistakes during the process. Additionally I’m always looking for new ways to… break the application :wink: I also look at the project from the end user point of view, trying to catch as many elements as possible that need improvements from both the visual side and the behaviour side.

I’m the kind of guy that likes to complain about everything during development, for example: “Sorry guys, this shouldn’t be like that, we have to fix this”. I mean this of course in a good way, referring to the good quality of our work. During each of our development cycles I verify all of the functionalities to be sure that new elements are not causing any problems to the other ones. In the meantime I’m focusing on testing new stories in terms of functionality and proper UI design, trying to suggest better (if possible) solutions for implemented stories.

What’s particularly great for me about this project is that I can work with amazing, friendly and qualified people like, Sujato, Blake, Vimala and with the Polish team. Working with You is pure pleasure! But the most valuable thing is the actual project subject. I’ve never had a chance to learn and hear so much interesting information about Buddha’s teachings and in this project I got that chance. It’s really good to broaden my horizons. It helps to better understand the people and the world around us.

Kind regards,
Krzysiek

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Hey Krzysiek, thanks for the kind words. It’s been great working with you, and knowing that someone is taking a careful and systematic approach to making sure everything works.

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