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The Willows are Growing!
I just wanted to share a quick update on my willow propagation project. They’re growing like crazy!
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Atomic Habits
Book Review
This book is everywhere. If you haven’t already heard of it, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll run across in a zillion different contexts in the next few weeks and months. There’s a good reason for that too: it’s excellent.
Atomic Habits is an easy to read manual that will help you to transform your life. That’s not an exaggeration . A lot of books, gurus, and charlatans will promise that, but this one delivers.
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Near Shore Teams
My wife and I were chatting recently about how neither one of us can understand why organizations seem to love hiring offshore team members. It never seems worth it. Even if they cost half of what a more-or-less local team member would cost, the overhead in managing that dependency more than eats up those savings.
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Willow Propagation
I’ve been wanting to try propagating willow trees for quite some time. According to some internet searching, it’s super easy. Long term, I’m hoping to build a living fence. I took the first steps over the weekend.
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How to Read a Book
Book Review
This classical work has been on my reading list for almost 20 years. One of my college professors (I wish I could remember his name) recommended it on the first day of class. He asserted that even though all of us knew how to read, most of us did not know how to read well. He told us that this book would teach us how to do that.
I should have listened to him a long time ago.
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Book Reviews!
I love to read. It occurred to me that there are multiple reasons that I should be writing about what I read. I’ve built out some content types and published my first book review. I hope you find it helpful.
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Resolution Updates & Expansion
I thought it was time for another update on my New Year’s non-resolutions. I’m very happy to say that they’re still going really well. There are, of course, exceptions to how well it’s going.
I’ve also decided to try to expand my newfound habits to include writing more. This is the first instance of that endeavor.
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Successful Non-resolutions
As I mentioned before, I tried something a little different this year regarding self-improvement in the new year. Specifically, I told myself that I wouldn’t watch TV for the month of January and started what is likely the most gentle exercise ramp-up ever devised.
I’m happy to report that both have been resounding successes.
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New Year, No Resolution
I’ve written a couple times before about New Year’s Resolutions. Like most people, I suck at them. Even after following my own advice, I’ve repeatedly fallen into failure. That’s why I’m trying something different this year.
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Leadership Lessons from The Bear
My wife and I recently finished up the second season of The Bear on Hulu. While there’s a lot to appreciate in the show, especially in the context of leadership, there is a moment in the Season Two finale that looks like a huge failure on the main character’s part, is also a great moment where the positive results of his leadership are on full display.
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The Biggest Loser Between Musk and Zuck
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been duking it out lately. The most visible parts of their clash has played out across their respective social media platforms, often in juvenile fashion. While their battle hasn’t actually spilled over into physical combat yet, it’s also playing out in the real world beyond social media space.
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POSSE Content Strategy
There are a few different circumstances that are coming together in my life in the moment that have made me reconsider the way I approach the content I create and put on the internet.
As such, I’m piloting a POSSE content strategy.
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Fighting Social Network Addiction
When Facebook first launched, I was excited. It seemed so cool! But then things started to change.
Other social network sites rose and fell. I abandoned Facebook, but not all social networks. And today, I struggle to manage my relationship with social networks.
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Less Focus, More Writing
I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) for a few years to blog more prolifically. I’ve set targets and goals for myself, only to miss them again and again. Clearly, I either need to re-evaluate my goal, or change my approach.
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There will always be more work than people
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that something I often hear at the workplace is that we need more
resourcespeople. I hear it over and over again, in every software development organization that I’ve ever worked in. So why is this? Why don’t we ever have enough people to do everything on our plates? -
Is Scrum Broken?
I’ve read a number of articles recently arguing that Scrum doesn’t work. With so many people having similar negative experiences, I’m starting to wonder: Is there a valid point here?
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People as Resources
Last week I did something that I generally try to avoid doing: I referred to people as resources. I don’t want to belabor why here, that discussion has been well covered on the internets. The gist is that lumping people into the same category as other resources dehumanizes people. What I’d like to do instead is talk about when I think it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
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The Efficiencies of Firefighters and Doctors
We all want to be efficient. We want to get stuff done. We want to make the most of our time. That’s efficiency. Unfortunately, those two things - getting stuff done quickly and making the most of our time - are often at odds.
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Combining a Kanban Board with a Day Planner
I mentioned previously that one way to hold oneself accountable to a goal is to to create a plan with microgoals milestones, and such. As someone who is passionate about agility and the practices that support it, a kanban board was my knee-jerk thought. But what about another tool I like, my Bullet Journal? I bounced back and forth a bit between the two, but then it hit me: They’re both flexible tools. Why not combine them?
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Handling Dependencies
One of the hallmarks of the agile mindset is cross-functional teams. If you’re working within the Scrum framework, this means that the team is comprised of “members [who] have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint.” The reason for this is that dependencies slow everything down. There are basically three different ways to approach those dependencies.
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50(ish) Posts
It’s that time of year again. The new year has come and gone, a couple weeks have gone by, and New Year’s Resolutions are already starting to fail in predictable fashion.
I’ve written in the past that SMART goals can help you to succeed with your resolutions, but that’s not enough. Creating accountability for yourself is another way of helping you to achieve your goals.
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"Just follow the process"
Variations on this are something I hear fairly frequently, from lots of people in lots of organizations. So why does this happen? Why don’t people follow the process. In my experience, there are three reasons.
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Scrum Graphic
Recently, I was preparing for a Scrum class that I would be teaching remotely. Since I’m accustomed to doing training sessions in person, I’m used to drawing posters for my classes. However, this wasn’t going to work anymore and, as a result, I found myself in need of a good graphic of the Scrum Framework.
So I made my own. If you find it useful, please use it!
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Remote Training
Just before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, I found myself serendipitously working for Pearson, a “remote first” organization. One of the things I was excited about at Pearson was that I was pretty sure that I would be able to continue the Scrum training courses that I had previously given at Shelter. I wasn’t sure what those training sessions would look like in a remote first organization, but I had hoped to continue giving them in-person, in the same two day format to which I was accustomed. Covid-19 removed that possibility.
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Maximum Acceptable Shoddiness
MVP, or Minimum Viable Product is a term that gets thrown around business like crazy. It’s especially ubiquitous in “Agile” contexts. MVP is something that we constantly ask ourselves. What is the MVP? What can we put off until Day Two? What are the need-to-haves and what are the nice-to-haves? These are all great discussions to have.
However, sometimes, these conversations change.
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Dev Teams Need Sportsball Coaches
Any time that we look at professional sports teams, we see one thing in common: they all have coaches. Just like a sports team needs a coach to reach the championships, a development team needs a coach to reach its full potential.
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Expanding the Lean Penny Game
One of the most fun things about training is the way that the trainees surprise me. At my last training session, a team floored me with their creative solution to the penny game that I previously wrote about. Their innovation led them to a 40% increase in productivity. We played a few more rounds after the training to see how far we could push this, and what additional lessons might be gleaned from it.
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Modern Agile
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Modern Agile a lot. It took me a while to get my head wrapped around it at first, but it turns out that I was completely overthinking it. After watching Joshua Kerievsky’s excellent explanation, I’m finally starting to grok it.
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Agile and Lean
A buddy of mine from college, Brady Beckham, recently got in touch with me to ask me about agile. He focuses on lean manufacturing, trying to identify and eliminate or reduce waste in the manufacturing process. Through this, he had stumbled across agile and got enough of a sense of it to realize that there was probably some overlap. He gave me a call and asked if we could get together and share knowledge. Naturally, I jumped on that opportunity.
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Design Sprint
Our team engaged in a Design Sprint recently. A Design Sprint is a weeklong series of activities that takes a group of people from an initial idea or problem to a prototyped solution (or solutions) that have been tested by users. It’s one of the more fun things that I get to participate in as a facilitator.
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A Lean Penny Game for Cross Functional Teams
In his seminal work on the Theory of Constraints, The Goal, Eli Goldratt outlines a matchstick game to illustrate how variability in flow impacts a team’s ability to deliver. I decided to run a modified version of this game to show how cross functional teams can reduce that variability and deliver more consistently.
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The Battle for the Net
Over the next weekish, a number of websites will be engaged in a campaign to lobby the Senate to block the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality. As a supporter of an open internet, I have decided to participate in this campaign.Many of the arguments around net neutrality on both sides of the discussion tend to focus on business objectives. But I think that there’s a more important argument: Revoking net neutrality threatens our First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
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New Site! (again)
I’ve once again, rebuilt my website. I’m really excited about this rebuild. This time around, I’m using Jekyll, a static site generator. This gives me a few advantages over my old Craft site.
On top of using Jekyll, I’ve implemented a number of other improvements and new features.
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The First of Many Two-Day Training Sessions
Over the past several months, I’ve been building up my training skillset with several of my coworkers at Shelter Insurance. This past week one of those coworkers and I put on Shelter’s first in-house two-day Agile training session. It was super fun!
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Semantic Overload and Agile
One thing that drives me crazy about the agile world is the incredible prevalence of semantically overloaded terminology. Simply put, semantic overload is a word that has different meanings in different contexts. The problem with this is that it can create confusion. For example, if I tell you that I’m going to run to the store, you don’t actually know if I’m going to drive or jog. You might assume one or the other. You might make some inferences based on context or past history. But you don’t know.
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Learning from Failure with the Five Whys
An important idea that we take away from Agile software development is examining our failures and learning from them. We take a hard look at what caused us to fail and fix the problem. One of the ways we do that is through a technique called “Five Whys.”
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SMART Goals to Make Your New Year's Resolutions Successful
We’re pretty bad at New Year’s resolutions. According to some research, 92% of them fail. SMART goals are a great way to set better goals for ourselves when we’re setting our New Year’s resolutions. They save us from the common trap of poorly defined goals, which gives a better chance of beating the odds.
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Doing Agile vs. Being Agile
When we talk about agile, we tend to talk about it in the context of “doing.” There’s also the concept of “being agile” and the two ways of framing agility lead to different thinking about agility, what it means, and how to achieve it.
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How Big Is a Story Point?
The team that I work with has long struggled with a question around story points: How do they scale?
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I made some art... Or did I?
The subjective nature of art often leaves us questioning whether or not something is art. Is it art if someone is just slinging paint against a canvas? What if it could have been done by a toddler? What if it was done by a toddler? Nowadays, with computers, a new kind of question is arising: How much human intervention is required to make art?
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New Site!
If you’ve been paying attention to my site, you’ve probably noticed that it looks a little different than it used to. It’s not just the look of the site though, it’s a whole new website, inside and out. I’ve completely rebuilt the site from the ground up in Craft. Craft offers a lot of development opportunities that were prohibitively time consuming in my old CMS, Wordpress. I’ve already done a few things that I’d been putting off in Wordpress and plan on doing quite a few more.
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New York Trip – Book II
Brooke and my continued adventures in New York.
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New York Trip – Book I
Brooke and I went to New York a few weeks back. Her employer sent her to Nielsen Norman’s Usability Week. These are some of our adventures.
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It’s all about moderation.
One of my most oft-visited sites on the internets is Bicycles Stack Exchange. I was recently elected to be a moderator for the site.
