UltraNormal: Kevin's Entries

Murray Wilson Is Awesome

Kevin Lawver — 2010-08-25T17:32:53-05:00

My pal Murray Wilson does great things - he and AWOL take kids the system doesn't want and teaches them to take apart, clean and refurbish computers the system doesn't want - computers that would otherwise go to the landfill.

They then put linux on them and put them out into the community with families that need them. He's one my absolute favorite people in Savannah (nay, the world) and I'm proud to know him.

The computers will, of course, end up in the landfill eventually, but the "Goon Squad" gives them easily another 2-5 years of life, and the kids learn useful and marketable skills. It's a win-win, and an amazing program and Murray and AWOL built from the ground up.

If you can spare it, AWOL can always use some help. Every little bit helps, and every kid they help is one that's not in the juvenile justice system or out on the street by themselves.

Murray is awesome in the best sense of the word.

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Thoughts on Kanban

Kevin Lawver — 2010-08-19T11:42:13-05:00

I was introduced to Kanban by Brad Taylor from Rails Machine when we were talking about agile and how to do it in an ops environment where there's a lot of reacting that's hard to plan for. Since I come from the product dev world, where releases are easier to plan, Scrum works pretty well.

What's Kanban? The best introduction I've read so far is Kanban Developmnt Oversimplified. I also attended a great introduction to Kanban by David Laribee at BizConf, so some of my thoughts came out of that intro and not the article.

In my own words, Kanban is an agile approach to development where you take away most of the structure found in Scrum and replace it with visual queues for progress. You basically have buckets for things: Planning, Defined (ready for development), Being Developed, Testing and Ready. You place limits on how many things can be in those buckets, which keeps you from working on too many things at once. The visual queues are displayed on a board with columns for each bucket. That allows you, in a small team, to see where your bottlenecks are and where you have availability. I think it's a great approach for a team of equals, where you don't really need the metrics you get from Scrum (team velocity, estimates vs. actuals, etc), or a small centrally located team. The physical Kanban board becomes useless when you've got remove people, since they can't act on their own cards or see the board all the time.

If I was running a 3 person shop where we all worked on the same product, I'd do Kanban instead of Scrum. I also think the visual representation of the board - what's being worked on right now - is a great tool for seeing your team's current status. We're trying out Wallsome as our Kanban board (we can't do the physical board because we have folks in Spain). I chose it because it uses our existing Basecamp data, which makes the adoption cost relatively low for us. I checked out a bunch of other web-based Kanban tools and they all required me to re-enter everything, which I just don't have time to do.

But, I'm running a team where I need to help people improve. So, having the data I get out of Scrum is extremely important - and Scrum just works for us. We know what we're working on, when the next release to production is, and can easily communicate that to whoever needs to know. Switching to Kanban would only take things away without improving efficiency (OK, it might, but I'm not seeing how right now). We are going to use Wallsome for a while and see if it helps us keep better track of the flow of tasks during a sprint, but I don't see us switching to Kanban completely anytime soon.

So, I think Kanban's great for teams where you spend a lot of time reacting to events outside of your control, small centrally located teams or teams where they're just starting to get into Agile and don't have a lot of different projects. But, our team has been doing Scrum for two years, and it works for us. We're already Agile and have a well-established process (and more importantly, a change management process for those things we just have to "react" to on short notice) with Scrum that works for us. The switching costs at this point are higher than I'm willing to bear.

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Thursday Morning Hijinks

Kevin Lawver — 2010-08-19T09:57:02-05:00

This morning, as a congratulations, Andrew (our awesome designer at work) sent me the following image:

Because I have a headache and was in the mood to cause trouble, I opened Pixelmator and created the following abomination, which I sent back.

Happy Thursday morning!

(and if you don't know what goatse is... please don't go look it up. You'll be sorry.)

Update: and here is Andrew's response...

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Sunrise on Tybee

Kevin Lawver — 2010-07-25T08:59:43-05:00

I got up really early this morning to go take pictures of the sunrise. It's something I've been thinking about doing pretty much since we moved here. Since I don't have anywhere I need to be today or much I have to do, I decided that today was the day. It was totally worth it.

Now I'm going to take a nap.

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Rails Resources

Kevin Lawver — 2010-07-22T09:00:45-05:00

Shawn Medero asked for some Rails resources on Twitter last night, and here they are. All of the blogs are from my feed reader and the links are things that are pretty much always on one of my first five browser tabs. I'm sure I'm missing some great Ruby and Rails blogs from this list, so if you have any... bring 'em on.

Documentation:

Rails API
Ruby Docs
Rails Guides
Sinatra Rubygems - A great little app from Jesse Newland that serves up the RDocs for all your gems. I use it every day all the time on my laptop.

Blogs:

Ruby Inside
Rails Machine
GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS (seriously)
The Real Adam
Phusion
Intridea
Rails Tips
ones zeros majors and minors
Codefluency

Books:

I use O'Reilly's Ruby in a Nutshell as a desk reference all the time. It's so worn out, I probably need to order another copy (although I do have the PDF now).
With Rails 3 just around the corner, I would wait if you want to get a Rails book. Maybe start with the Manning Early Access Program and get Rails 3 In Action

I only listen to one Ruby podcast: Ruby5 - It's only a couple times a week and only 5 minutes at a time, which is perfect for short attention spans.

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10 Years

Kevin Lawver — 2010-07-20T16:09:31-05:00

I've been blogging, right here, for ten years. The first post on lawver.net was on 07/20/2000 and didn't say a whole lot. Since then, though, Jen and I have posted 2,631 entries. Jen didn't start blogging here until about 2005, so out of that, almost 2,000 of them are mine.

I don't think I've stuck with a hobby longer than this, except maybe collecting comic books when I was a kid (non-stop from age eleven until 22 and then off and on collections).

I'm pretty proud of this little blog. Yes, the design is old, and it's slow at times. But, it's a record of our lives over the last ten years that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Here's to the next ten and whatever comes next.

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Today's Idea: TED Lesson Plans

Kevin Lawver — 2010-06-23T10:37:33-05:00

While we were up in DC for Steve's wedding, TEDx Creative Coast happened down here in Savannah. I've had several conversations with folks about how high energy it was and how excited everyone was about the event, and that there has to be some way to keep that energy going.

I got to thinking about it, and how cool would it be to create lesson plans for teachers around TED talks? They could show the video, then have a discussion with the kids, or some activity around the topics discussed in the video.

I don't have time to implement it, but I'm putting the idea out there in case someone wants to run with it. I figure it could be a wiki, or something wiki-like, where you take the video, and then build the lesson plan below it.

I'm not sure TED has an API for pulling all the talks, but it wouldn't be too hard to scrape the podcast feed and do it auto-magically.

If you do something like this, or know of something that already exists, let me know!

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My Summer Plan - Produce More, Consume Less

Kevin Lawver — 2010-05-28T12:06:30-05:00

When I get home from work, I'm usually pretty tired (OK, most nights, I'm really tired). So, I don't do much other than:

Sometimes make dinner. Usually Jen makes it or we order out, but I do cook on occasion.
Play video games with the kids
Watch TV
Screw around on my ubuntu laptop, but mostly I surf or play games while watching TV.

And that's it. On rare occasions, I do community stuff like go to Refresh.

Since I don't travel much anymore, I can't remember the last time I read a book. I have a stack of things I want to read that I just haven't gotten around to. I have a ton of little personal projects that are sitting around partially done that I should finish.

So, this summer, I'm going to watch less TV and do more. I'm going to read some books, write some code and have some fun. I know reading isn't "producing" anything, but it's more educational and intellectually stimulating than watching fictional characters on TV have and resolve fictional problems.

My first project? Redo this blog. I realized we've been running this blog Movable Type for almost 8 years, and running it on Dreamhost for over 7. This "design" (if you can call it that) has been here, basically untouched, but over 5. It's time to do something else. I rarely post anymore because it's slow. I put most little stuff over on tumblr, and only come here for longer posts.

My plan for the blog is to build my own from scratch. I know, I know, the world has enough blogging platforms. I'm not going to make a "platform". It's just a blog for Jen and me that's fun to play with and easy to maintain. It'll be on Rails and backed by MongoDB, so it should be trivial to add new stuff, rip it out, start over, or move it around.

I plan on taking my time, playing with new stuff along the way (web fonts, HTML5, writing tests, the design, etc), and will roll it out when I feel like it.

I'll take breaks to do some reading, but won't be doing any other personal hackery until it's done. Once it's finished, if there's time, I have an idea for a twitter app I've been wanting to play with and couple things I've started with other folks that I want to finish up.

It should be fun. I'll post updates as I feel like it. In the meantime, what are you going to produce this summer?

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Little Boys and Little Dogs

Kevin Lawver — 2010-05-02T12:48:10-05:00

My friend Brad invited us to his awesome Derby Day party - and we had a great time. The boys got to play with his 10 week old puppy, Rocky. As you can see, they loved every minute of it.

And here are the rest of the pics of the boys being boys. Enjoy!

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Restraining Myself

Kevin Lawver — 2010-04-22T16:11:45-05:00

I've registered too many domain names. I have almost fifty and most of them aren't being used for anything. So now, instead of wasting more money registering domain names that I have big ideas but no time for, I'm sharing them with the internet! I've been posting them to twitter, but now that I've done two of them, I figure it's time for a blog post about them. Here they are, along with the original idea behind them:

butchtutu.com - I have a horrible idea for a serial about a cowboy who rides alone through the Old West "hellbent on reconciliation" and "busting heads in the name of forgiveness". It just struck me as a really funny idea. And yes, it's still available. (I may end up writing this on Ficly)
bigbadbaboon.com - It's a domain name and a tongue twister! Inspired by this awesome monkey by Jon Morris. I think it would be a great name for a design firm, heavy metal blues band or comic strip about unruly teenage mercenaries.
metaldick.com - Another serial idea about a robotic private eye who solves human cases with cold logic and learns emotions from his brassy secretary, Gladys.

Your welcome, internet. If you end up registering them and using them for either the intended purpose or something else, let me know.

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