Entries from August 2013 ↓

In place of actual content, I give you this.

It’s been a busy week; I celebrated my 40th birthday with a small vacation up to Portland, Maine, and came back to the kind of “Everyone Must Change” insanity that everyone at EMC is familiar with.  But, I didn’t forget you.  Links I stumbled on via RSS this week:

• There are reasons to like and dislike using external identity providers like Facebook, but recent changes in what apps must ask permission to do will help tip that balance.
• How to research your blog posts.  Nice breakdown!
• I can’t wait to get this into a Words With Friends game.
• Management issues for terrorist organizations.
• Sad report of an assassination in India.

Until next week….

Recently, I took the Certified Scrum Product Owner class with Angela Druckman.  Angela was an excellent teacher and brought some new perspectives to me, and everyone in the class.

My organization has been using Agile/Scrum in one way or another for several years now, and much of the class felt like a review.  But, as the class went on, I realized just how much we had modified “textbook” Scrum to fit our needs, and it gave me some interesting moments of introspection relating to what that tells me about our organization and the way we do business.  That may not be the value most people expect in taking a class, but I tend to find that the biggest wins from formal training aren’t usually in direct addition of knowledge (“I know Kung Fu“), but rather in being forced to think about things in new ways, or in the side conversations you have the luxury of having since you aren’t at your desk focusing on getting something done.

Continue reading →

Last week I took the Scrum Certified Product Owner course, and I’ve got some ideas of content to share here from that, but in the mean time, enjoy some information I’ve stolen from my RSS feeds….

• Is impactful business jargon … or something even weirder?  I love Language Log for posts like this.
• Want to raise prices?  Tell a story.  Does this factor in with salary negotiation, I wonder?
• This visualization of sorting algorithms put a smile on my inner CS geek’s face.
• Yes, there are fake likes on Facebook.  I didn’t quite picture it like this, though.
• What happens to your data validation code when employees have names like “Null”?  A real question or a thought experiment?

That’s all for now….