Where Are The Wise Men?

Blaine finally let the cat out of the bag – I’m finally doing a Django talk for the Omaha Dynamic Language Group.  If you saw my Django talk for the Omaha Python Group, this one will be similar, only with a little more background and a small comparison with Ruby on Rails.  The application will [...]

I’ve been playing with ack the past couple of days and, really, it’s pretty cool.  It automatically recurses into directories, only searching through files it knows about, and ignores VCS files and directories, like .svn, .cvs, .hg, etc.  You can easily tell it your filetypes with –python, –java, etc. on the command line. It’s in [...]

I’ve recently discovered another wonderful thing about Emacs – Version Control

Let’s say you are working on a project that is under some version control system.  You are editing a file and you type “C-x v v”.  Then Emacs will do the next logical thing with that file.  If the file is not on version control, [...]

Did you know that today was Dump the Pump Day?  No, I didn’t either until about 3pm.  But a day about raising awareness about Public Transportation couldn’t be more timely than now.  Wired has a great little write-up about it.

Of course, I didn’t know about it because Omaha’s public transportation didn’t participate.  It would have [...]

Today was a first in my career — I sat on the other side of the interviewing table.  In others words, I was the job interviewer, not the job interviewee.

To be fair, it was an internal interview and I also knew the guy and encouraged him to apply.  I’m also not a  decision maker.  My [...]

I’ve struggled with my weight my entire adult life. You have to understand that to understand what follows:

Around the beginning of the year, I started making a list of “things I want to accomplish”. Not quite resolutions, but things that absolutely needed to be done. I put “Lose Weight” at the bottom [...]

My manager was able to squeeze in another last-minute feature into this sprint.  When he told me what it was, I wasn’t too happy about it.  That part of the code isn’t the greatest, and I knew that we have some issues in that part of the functionality anyway.  I scheduled about 3 days for [...]

Just before the Memorial Holiday, I took a class through work officially called “Effective Leadership” but it was actually “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Managers” and it was taught by an instructor from FranklinCovey.  I went into the class not thinking that it would be very good, but left knowing that I could change [...]

Bart on his latest mission:we get to make things up as we go along, and take chances on people that nobody else would take chances on, and hold our breath together. And we get to do all that with the almost giddy confidence that all the love in the world is on our side.You may [...]

Even though this is our sixth sprint on this project, we hadn’t had a Sprint Retrospective yet.  Until today, which was not only my first Retrospective but my first as the ScrumMaster.

I was amazed what came out of things they wanted to see in the next sprint but quickly agreed that we need to to [...]