Author: Mathghamhain

I am volunteering to serve the SCA’s College of Arms as the Morsulus Herald, the staffer responsible for publishing and indexing the names and armory registered by the College.

I figured I’d go ahead and publish my application letter for two reasons: firstly, to serve as an example to other folks volunteering for positions in the College, and secondly as an accountability measure, so that folks can look back at this a few years from now and see whether I accomplished any of the things I set out to do.

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To Birgitta Laurel Queen of Arms, and to the College of Arms, salutations.

I am writing today to volunteer as a candidate for the position of Morsulus Herald.

My three decades of professional experience as a full-time software developer has provided me with the technical, analytical, and interpersonal skills required for this position:

• I have extensive familiarity with the Perl programming language (which I have used regularly since 1995) and with the other platforms underlying the Morsulus codebase.
• I have internalized the lessons and techniques of modern Internet-centric software development based on reusable components, project tracking, and online communication.
• I can effectively discover organizational requirements and tailor solutions to meet them across the full range from high-level system architecture to detailed user interface design.
• My career as a project manager, independent contributor, and freelancer has prepared me both to coordinate closely with others and to make steady self-directed progress on large projects and ongoing responsibilities.

Over the last six years, I’ve worked to understand and improve the technology that powers the Society’s armorial database, and to make that knowledge available to others:

• I’ve become familiar with the full submissions process by consulting, commenting, assisting my kingdom’s submissions heralds, and sitting in on Sovereign decision meetings.
• I have studied the existing O&A software, contributed multiple proposed code changes that have been merged in to the Morsulus applications to improve the end-user functionality, and built proof-of-concept demonstrations of possible directions for future work.
• I’ve written documentation explaining how both the front-end search and back-end update software works, contributed to online discussions about the armorial database, and taught related classes at KWHSS and at local events here in the East.
• I’ve interviewed three of the four people who had previously served as Morsulus in order to assemble a history of how the O&A developed into its current form.
• In recent years I’ve also had discussions with Non Scripta, Silver Staple, and the Archivist to better understand the context of the behind-the-scenes information flows and expectations around the systems Morsulus manages.

My work in other areas of the Society demonstrates my commitment and reliability:

• I’ve held numerous offices at the canton, baronial, and kingdom levels, including as branch herald, local seneschal, youth marshal, webminister, and event steward.
• Over the last eight years I’ve built and maintained the Book of Traceable Art, which has become the primary source of armorial clip art used in Society submissions.
• During the last eight months I’ve worked with Codex and Clarion to make updates throughout the College of Arms website, including improved navigation and better usability on mobile devices.

Should I be selected, my goals for my time in the position of Morsulus would be to:

• Live up to the standard of timely LoAR and O&A updates set by my predecessor.
• Rebuild the armory-indexing tool with a web interface rather than XWindows so that armory indexing duties can be shared among multiple contributors. (This will also allow the outgoing Morsulus emeritus to review my efforts in the most heraldically-challenging aspect of the position during the transition period.)
• Provide an updated search interface for oanda.sca.org that leverages modern interactive web technologies, while retaining the current interface as a “classic mode” option to preserve compatibility with current documentation and workflows for folks who have grown accustomed to it.
• Revise the deployment tooling for the public-facing search tools, so that updating the ordinary data is independent from rebuilding the distribution package, and so that compilation products are not stored in the source repository, which will facilitate a more- modern branch-and-merge development approach.
• Migrate the database-update process to a shared server and increase the level of documentation, logging, and automation to improve transparency and disaster resilience, and to decrease the amount of esoterica known only to one or two individuals.
• Bring the technology platform up to date and make it more accessible to the community of techie heralds in such a way that there’s a larger pool of candidates ready to take on this position when I am ready to step down, so that future terms in this office can return to a more-normal span of five or ten years rather than twenty-five.

Although I suspect I might be the only applicant for this office, should it turn out that there are others who are interested in the position, I would love to speak with them about ways in which we might collaborate or usefully divide up the responsibilities of this office to best serve the College’s needs.

If you have any questions about my qualifications or intentions for this office, I would be glad to discuss them in detail at any time that might be convenient for you.

— Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin

The personal heraldic title which I submitted earlier this year was accepted and registered on this month’s LoAR, which has prompted some to ask: “why a gadfly?”

I chose the name Gadfly not because of a particular affinity with the family of insects also known as horse-flies, but rather for its metaphorical connotations.

Continue reading “Gadfly Herald Extraordinary”