Panic Blog

Last year, a friend of Tim’s e-mailed almost everyone he knew with a simple plea:

“We just started coaching 4th and 5th grade basketball at Public School 208 [in New York City],” he wrote. “Most of the kids don’t have basketball shoes, and many of them end up practicing in the pants and t-shirts that they wear to school.  We want to buy practice jerseys, game jerseys, and basketball shoes (something a little difficult on a student budget). Let us know if you’d be willing to help out.”

Tim forwarded it to me.

“We can totally help,” I said. “With one condition: they let us design the jerseys!”

And that’s how Panic came to sponsor the coolest basketball team in the world: PS 208’s Locke’s Lions.

In their last game, led by Coaches Chad and Steve, the Locke’s Lions beat the stinky PS 134 Jaguars in an impressive 28-22 win. But, more than that, one only has to look at these photos to remember how awesome it is to be a kid, play a game, and love a thing. We’re proud to be an indirect, remote part of that feeling.

The kids sent along some super nice thank-you notes at the end of the season which we thought you’d like to see. We only hope that, one day, we can cheer them on in person.

PS: The Locke in question is not, in fact, the squinty and mysterious John Locke out of television’s hit show Lost, but rather the philosopher and “Father of the Harlem Renaissance”, Alain Locke. TMYK.GIF

This is probably the busiest year in Panic’s history.

This is good. But a lot of things happening means a high chance that I, the man who lives and breathes Panic and has a giant status board in my head, might not properly explain everything to everyone. Steve and I realized it was high time we made this Cabel Status Board public… using technology!

So, with partial inspiration, Neven, Steve and I built the Panic Status Board. Take a secret, sneek peek:

What’s on the board?

The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:

• E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
• Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
• Important Countdowns
• Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
• Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
• The Panic Calendar
• Employee Twitter Messages
• Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

Instant Pay-Off

Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

We can’t wait to add more data in the future. Open bugs?

Implementation Notes

For the truly curious. Display: I picked the Samsung 460UXN-2 professional display for the thin bezel and lack of branding, airport-style. To my surprise, it had a built-in Windows XP Embedded computer (boo), which meant we didn’t have to waste a machine to drive the display (yay). We loaded Chrome on it, since it has a nice full-screen view — sadly, that meant we had to lose Safari’s beautiful text anti-aliasing. Display Mount: Hard to find a vertical mount! Wound up with the Premier Mounts RFM, and like it. Support Queue: I’m weird, and PHP IMAP libraries felt too heavy for just getting message counts, so I decided to do raw IMAP protocol calls over a socket. Bus Arrivals: this is using the fantastic Tri-Met real-time REST API. Calendar: Steve used the PHP iCalendar library to parse our group Mac OS X Server calendar. Twitter: feeds use Twitter’s simple (little-known?) blogger JSON service. HTML/CSS: Neven says, “This baby is all WebKit candy. The only images here are the icons. The rounded corners, the gradients, the animation – all CSS. Learn -webkit-transform and love it! Oh, I tried using Google Chart for the support graph, but it wasn’t flexible enough. Our little graph is infinitely scalable and stretchable.”

From start to finish, this was about a three-week project.

And no, it didn’t slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!

PS: For one full year I’ve been promising a blog about the “new” office. If you can believe this, we’re still waiting on a guy to finish processing a couple of nice QTVR’s of the office under construction. With any luck, he’ll be done soon, and I’ll start writing…