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kanban development oversimplified + shiny bits on couchdb

Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While  watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability.

With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some of our scrum practices (e.g. sprint planning, release planning) and began to smooth our rhythm out until we ended up, more or less, as continuous-flow.

The great thing is, I’ve looked back on earlier teams and seen similar trends - but different results. This time (for me) reality & results were stronger than dogma & fear - so we went with what made us better.

Then, I stumbled across Kanban Development Oversimplified and passed it out - it’s a great quick & simple overview.

It’s not good enough to be doing something… I’ve got to build something related. So, combine this with the desire to get some more experience with some new shiny bits (standalone apps on couchdb) and ta da: a simple board with cards + columns to represent our worfklow (surely a cliched application, along with blogs); the board will be a centralized service and a de-centralized service (ref: git) so that people can take their own copy of the board with them - keep using it - and sync up with either the centralized service or another instance, as needed. More later: I’ll post some cucumber scenarios and then a link to the project on github.

2009 05 29 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

FiveRuns at RailsConf/CabooseConf and taking folks to see Penn & Teller

Attending RailsConf and/or CabooseConf? Join FiveRuns to see Penn & Teller perform at the Rio on Tuesday night.

We’ve got transportation and 40 tickets to catch Penn & Teller at the Rio on Tuesday night. Want to join us? Drop your name in the… hat. Okay, it’s not a hat, but you get the idea.

Enter your name before 8am Tuesday morning; winners will be notified by 10am via email.

See you in Las Vegas!

2009 05 01 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step

O’Reilly and Eric Ries are doing an interesting webcast - Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step. Having recently waded into this end of the pool - I’m getting a lot out of the whole lean startup idea. No great surprise, since it extends what I’m familiar with, from within product development, to all the streams of work that makes up a startup

2009 04 29 admin Business
Product Development Comments (0) Permalink

Intriguing (and radical) approach on how to operate a business

Check out  ”The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project. It describes a radical approach (at least from my POV) on how to operate a business. I’m not a business operations person, so I don’t have the chops to completely evaluate the proposition here ahead of time. However, there are some intrigiung ideas in this article and I love where this could lead (not to mention the potential to upset the apple cart).

2009 03 24 admin Business Comments (0) Permalink

Build a personal relationship manager on LinkedIn… maybe

I’ve always wanted some simple ‘personal relationship manager’, i.e. the problem is that I’ve got friends and acquaintances I want to keep up with - but I am lousy at reminding myself to follow-up when I don’t see them regularly. I want a way to:

  • get a dashboard that shows me what’s new with people in my social networks
  • organize the dashboard based on some heuristics on what social networks are more important than others (e.g. ex-Excite people, current co-workers, etc.)
  • default and customizable alerts to notify me
    • when it’s been a long time since I communicated with someone
    • when something about those people or their company has changed
  • a single place to view and edit some basic info on a person (e.g. notes)
  • all based on an understanding of my social networks (e.g. declared social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and implicit social networks like email)

How to solve this? Up to now, I’ve thought about ways to augment my email, i.e. using my email history and address book. From the looks of it, Xobni does something similar with Outlook and there’s chatter they may do this eventually for hosted email (e.g. gmail). However, last night I realized that (for the moment) much of what I care about could be in LinkedIn. Surely someone has solved this via a LinkedIn application… Unfortunately, no, e.g I didn’t even find any way to keep notes on other people in my network. No problem, I’ll write an application… but right away their stance isn’t encouraging. While their wording does not encourage me to take an exploratory run at something new on LinkedIn,  I’ll apply and see what happens.

2009 01 22 admin Product Ideas Comments (1) Permalink

Clarity in the cloud & congratulations to whurley

Open source “evil genius” whurley has announced he will be writing a column for InfoWorld on cloud computing, and it appears that his initial focus will be to help bring clarity to ‘just what cloud computing means’. I’m looking forward to reading it.

2009 01 07 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Oh CouchDB, Why Do I Love Thee So…?

Ok, so why are my friends and co-workers noticing my minor obsession about CouchDB? There’s a few reasons. First, I have a long-term unlove-affair with RDBMS. Why?

  • I started off working in the UNIX kernel (V6 anyone?) and there’s no stinking databases in there… just some filesystem stuff
  • After learning and using C, I jumped to Smalltalk and like a newborn duckling, I was imprinted by the Smalltalk view of the world - which forever set my idea about persistent data + behavior.
  • Along the way, I bumped into Thomas Malone’s work on Object Lens and OVAL - which further evolved my thinking about collaborative work, semi-structured data and toolkits to enable end-users to compose their own tools; incuding the notion that not every object needs behavior- sometimes it’s just data (e.g. the archetypical business card is just some useful semi-structure data).
  • And finally - the cognitive dissonance between the relational model and the common OO / prototype-based languages / domain models was constantly bothered me.

Yes - I know they’ve been effective and have benefit in lots of scenarios, however…

Secondly, for a piece of ‘middleware’, CouchDB has great elegance and great congruence with the bevy of potential uses, i.e. it appears to afford us the possibility to think about our problem/solution domains and our softwares internal models in in very similar fashions - with some very interesting beneficial side-effects (e.g. eventual consistency, availability)

And finally, there’s some rumblings of a new application model all together - reminiscent of the agents buzz from over a decade ago, i.e. Chris Anderson’s Sharable apps - where a CouchDB instance is sufficiently capable to become an application platform and that via the synchronization model, multiple instances of an application could run in a distributed & isolated manner and then synchronize and migrate as needed to different environments, i.e. run locally on laptops and sync and migrate up to centralized servers and then back down as needed. Instead of a rigid & pre-defined deployment structure, it’s more of an organic ’shape’ adjusting as needed. If this is a new degree of freedom, the potential is huge.

So, while I’m looking for the right opportunity to try some of these ideas out - I’ll continue this minor obsession and see where it leads.

2008 12 21 admin Product Development
Product Ideas Comments (2) Permalink

Twitter Updates for 2008-12-03

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2008 12 03 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

@juliegomoll - more of a tweak…

@juliegomoll - more of a tweak at those who ‘left behind’ long-form-blogs and now only do short-form-tweets

2008 12 03 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

housekeeping on my blog. remem…

housekeeping on my blog. remember blogs? so last … decade? years?

2008 12 03 admin Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink