Where Are The Wise Men?

An actual IM between me and a co-worker:

Co-worker:    here is that acronym i’d found Co-worker:    SCRUM = Stand-ups, Comprehsive Retrospectives, Unlimited Meetings Me :          that rocks — and it true

We played poker yesterday in our Sprint Planning meeting.  Not Five Card Stud, or Texas Hold’em but Planning Poker.

Our previous planning efforts were okay — it was horrible at first but we got better at it.  This time I wanted to do something different to not only see if we can get more exact, but [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

I hate upgrading WordPress. I was reminded of that a week or so ago when I tried to get to WordPress 2.5.1. It’s not WordPress’s fault — it’s my provider.

I’m not going to rant against them, but I will point out that, whenever I try to FTP a lot of files, the FTP stalls [...]

One recent event I haven’t blogged about is that I was recently asked to be ScrumMaster by my manager.  That sounds sorta like a title from a D&D game gone horribly wrong, but once you know what it is, it’s not that bad.  It may help to know that Scrum is a methodology for developing [...]

I recommend you read Ted Neward’s I’m Pro-Choice… Pro Programmer Choice, that is.And I wish I could say, “Alright! I agree!” But I can’t. Because, I hate to say it, we can’t language or OS agnostic. But it’s hard be a generalist in a specialist kind of industry. If you advertise [...]

I’ve been using log4j for a long time, but never got into Python’s logging module. But last week I was sitting in a class about logging and my company’s new standard and toolset. The instructor kept giving Python as an example (as well as log4j) of a logging system that worked with our logging repository. [...]