While the bike itself has no lights to speak of, We are lighting the servers(encased in lexan) and the bike with everything from cold cathode tubes to hi-power led's of course all of this will work by remote control.

The final product for the servers on this bike are major evolution from their original inception. When the idea of building a drag bike was first brought to me the plan was simply to mount the smallest thing we could that would pass for a web server, which at the time was going to be a VIA Pico-ITX board with 512MB of memory, 1GHz cpu, a compact flash card for storage, a wireless internet link, and a small screen. With this hardware we simply planned on serving a few static pages, but as time went on we wanted to be able to serve more like GPS information, and video of the race.

When marketing got on board with the idea Rob Cassidy wanted bigger, and I mean a lot bigger. Our original idea would not cut it, so all of the planned components were scrapped and we went bigger. To squeeze the power we needed out of these servers we moved up to dual Mini ITX boards with 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processors and 4GB of memory. During the server build we did hit a snag with the first set of motherboards we chose, Zotac NF630i. Though many people were reporting success with similar setups we ran into constant stability issues which were narrowed down to memory errors. After extensive testing of the server memory in other known good machines as well as different brands of good memory in the motherboard intended for the bike we found that the issue was with the boards. After swapping out the old Zotac boards with similar Intel’s using the Q45 chipset we also had to go to Core 2 Duo E8500’s as the new boards did not support processors with power consumption over 65 watts.

In my next post I will go into detail on technology behind the data collection and video streaming that will be taking place on the bike.

As of today the server now officially has wireless broadband network connectivity through Verizon Wireless.  I had to take this opportunity to write the first blog post from the World's Fastest Server now that we are up and running with the new wireless network.  The network card was ordered from Cellular Sales in Orlando, FL (http://www.cellularsales.com). They were able to get the aircard out to us overnight so that testing could continue which was very much appreciated.  We are conducting speed tests and working on getting the live camera feed ready for action. The bike is coming together quickly now and everyone here is getting really excited!

Team Development

You can read about each team member in the About page, but how did we put together such a bang up crew? At the time this project started, Earl was a Support Supervisor here at Hostmysite.com and the majority of the Drag Bike Team was already on Earl's support team. We canvassed each of our abilities: Shawn builds bikes, Earl can manage, Brent develops ColdFusion, Bryan K can setup MS SQL replication, etc; we had the majority of what we needed already in a great team with high moral and camaraderie. As word got out that we got the green light for the project, we had requests from throughout the company of people wanting to get involved. We knew we could use as much help as possible and gladly welcomed everyone. In short order, the team as we know it emerged and things quickly got underway.

Managing Everyone

One of the hardest tasks (besides building a screaming electric drag bike, with two servers on board that stream data back to our Delaware datacenters) was getting and keeping the team organized. How do you keep a team of 15 core members with another 5 – 10 people as needed on-track and organized?

We used a variety of tools and strategies to keep things together. One of the first things we did after things started rolling was to implement a private wiki for the team. This has been instrumental in our ability to track everything from database connection information, deadlines and due dates, and most importantly our Scrum notes. The wiki is now our main source of information for everything bike related and each team member actively updates the information for all.

We quickly implemented an agile methodology with weekly scrum meetings to keep everyone updated on our progress. When your team’s work schedules are as varied as ours (with most working 3pm – Midnight, some working 9am – 5pm and some not even on site) in-person scrums hold us together. With those not making it in person available over the phone, we are able to get all the minds in one room to determine what needs to be completed in the next week. Without the scrum/agile methodologies, we’d likely be many months away from having anything completed.

Our early decisions continue to pay-off as we near completion, Earl has since moved to another position within Hostmysite.com; and the team easily copped since we still have weekly meetings and the wiki.

Coming up in my next post: developing a web site with only a few hours a week.