The engineering floor: a desk for every product
Floor 4 of the Extant 2000 office has six doors, one for each product, and a break room with two pool tables at the end of the corridor. This is the third post in the series, and engineering is the floor above the practice.
One door per product
Extant 2000 is a small company with a lot of products. The engineering office is the only one in the building that changes files, and I did not want one engineer holding all of them. An engineer who holds six products holds none of them. Every question starts by working out which repository it is about, and the answer arrives with no sense of what that codebase is usually like.
So the floor has a desk for each product, and each desk is a room with a door. A session that opens at a desk starts in the right code with the right history in front of it. Ask engineering something without naming a product and it still works on the whole tree. Name a product and it narrows to that desk.
Six products have a room on this floor.
| Door | Side | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration Management | West | Front of the corridor |
| Caelum | East | Front of the corridor |
| flamenet.io | West | Middle |
| Flamenet Messenger | East | Middle |
| FlameNet Video | West | Beside the lift |
| Leanwise | East | Beside the lift |
Configuration Management keeps the written configuration of the servers the other products run on. The others are named for their products.
Three other product desks sit on other floors. Hitt Fitness is in its own office in the gym on floor 5. The Hitt Hosting products have their own floor, 7. Engineering still answers for them from the same set of desks.
Two of these rooms have a history. Configuration Management took the room that Flamenet Files had, after Files was folded into the messenger. FlameNet Video is spelled with a capital N because the product spells itself that way. Flamenet Messenger does not, and I kept each desk matched to its product rather than forcing one house style over all of them. The video desk is also the one for this building, because it is built from the video store’s engine and there was nowhere more honest to put it.
The rooms are pairs, one on each side of the corridor, in three ranks. A sixth room used to be a spare. When Hitt Fitness moved up to the gym, its room stayed empty on purpose, because a floor with a free room is a floor with somewhere to put the next product. Video has the room now.
What a desk shows
Each room has a desk, a chair, a monitor, a cabinet and a plant. The product is named in four places: on the nameplate beside the door, on a header sign over the door, on a blade sign that sticks out into the corridor, and on the monitor. I added the blade because a flat sign on a corridor wall is a smear until you are standing next to it. The blade reads from down the hall.
Three things on each desk change with the live state of that product’s engineer.
A lamp by the door is green while a session is working, amber while work is queued, and dark when the desk is idle. A small flag appears on the door when the desk has stopped on a question for me. When a session is working, somebody sits down at the desk. The figure who normally sits there steps out, so a desk never has two people at it. The monitor scrolls lines of coloured bars in the shape of code.
The scrolling is not the work. It is drawn once from a fixed generator and is the same on every desk. A visitor at the door can see that somebody is busy and cannot see what they are busy with.
Visitors and the owner
The rule from the first post holds on this floor. The doors, the names and the layout are public. The work is not.
A visitor who is not signed in gets the same four states as I do: the lamp, the flag, the person at the desk and the scrolling monitor. The browser asks for them once every ten seconds. If the answer fails, for instance during a deploy, it waits longer, doubling up to a minute, and keeps the last good picture in the meantime. A building that went dark every time the office restarted would be telling visitors something untrue.
On the screen itself a signed-out visitor sees the product name and the word “locked”. I chose “locked” over “out of office” because “out of office” is a claim about whether anybody is working, and that is not a visitor’s business. The lamp already says that much and no more.
When I am signed in, the screens report what the desk is doing, and pressing E at a desk opens it so I can ask a question or read an answer. The visitor sees an office from the corridor. I see the same office with the work in it.
The break room
The corridor ends at the lift, and the lift stands in the middle of a wide room. On most floors that space is dead. On this one it is the break room, which is where you go when you have been staring at the same file for an hour.
It has two nine-foot pool tables, one on each side of the walk out of the lift. Each is racked at one end, with the cue ball up the table, and a cue lies on the rail because nobody puts it back. I built two because one table is a queue. A cue rack hangs on the back wall between them. Two high tables with stools stand against the far wall, because somebody is always watching rather than playing. The floor is wood where the corridor is not, so the room reads as somewhere else, and a lamp hangs low over each table. A sign reads THE BREAK ROOM over each of the two ways in, since you enter around the lift shaft on either side.
The directory in the lift lists the floor as Engineering, with the six products and the break room. It names nothing that is not there.