Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Thoughts on Kanban

    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.

  • Thursday Morning Hijinks

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

    fist bump!

    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.

    NOT a fist bump!

    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…

    Waaaaah!

  • Sunrise on Tybee

    Sunrise on Tybee

    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.

  • Rails Resources

    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:

    Blogs:

    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.

  • 10 Years

    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.

  • Today’s Idea: TED Lesson Plans

    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!

  • My Summer Plan – Produce More, Consume Less

    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?

  • Little Boys and Little Dogs

    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.

    Brian gets mauled

    Max gets mauled

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

  • Restraining Myself

    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.

  • My International Day of Awesomeness Manifesto

    Today is the third International Day of Awesomeness, a holiday I invented back in 2007. For the past three years, I’ve tried to perform a “feat of awesomeness” to commemorate the day. The first year, I dyed my hair blue, something I’d always wanted to do but never had the guts to actually do. Last year’s was less obvious, but there was a huge layoff at AOL the day before, so I wrote LinkedIn recommendations for all of my friends that got laid off instead of doing something else. This year, I walked around Forsyth Park with my friends Murray and Tom (something they do three times a week at 6:30AM), poorly organized a lunch at a brand new restaurant downtown, and am now doing part three – writing a manifesto. I wanted to write down, for the world to see, what I believe in and what I aspire to be. But, I remembered this TED Talk from Barry Schwartz and realized that he sums up most of it in 20 minutes of eloquence. So, watch it, and then join me down below.

    He talks quite a bit about “moral heroes” and celebrating them. My moral heroes are pretty simple: Mister Rogers, Elwood P. Dowd and Jesus Christ. All three men (fictional or not) contain the attributes I aspire to. They’re kind, empathetic and gentle.\
    I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want my kids to learn from me, and here’s the (very short) list I’ve come up with:

    • Be kind to everyone.
    • Do no harm.

    I think that if I can live those two things, everything else that I could do that would be considered good or worthwhile will follow naturally. As Jesus said, “And the second [great commandment] is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 22:39). Elwood P. Dowd, the protagonist in Harvey said it like this, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ – she always called me Elwood – ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”

    I don’t know about choosing between being smart or pleasant. I hope it’s possible to be both.

    And, I obviously stole the second item in the list from the Hippocratic Oath, but I think it applies to everyone, not just doctors. To me, that means not just avoiding physical harm but emotional. If you’re kind and empathetic, you’re not going to intentionally cause any kind of harm to anyone else – and you’re much less likely to cause it unintentionally.

    The world is full of well-meaning people who forget about empathy. We hear it every day: “I can’t imagine anyone living like that / doing that / feeling that way / loving that person / doing that to themselves / etc.” That shows a problem with their imagination, not with the other people. The things one person can’t imagine are held deeply by others. The things one person thinks are disgusting are the deepest feelings of another’s heart. We try to legislate away everything that makes us uncomfortable. We try to push deep down inside us those feelings that we can’t express because we lack the imagination to invent the words for them.

    I refuse to believe that there is too little imagination in the world for us to accept each other. Being “tolerant” isn’t good enough.

    If the second great commandment is to “love thy neighbor as thyself”, then nothing else can trump that, not the Old Testament, not Paul’s epistles, nothing else in Christian scripture beats Jesus Christ telling us to love each other (if you’re a Christian that is – if you’re not, that’s fine, the golden rule is a fairly universal concept – see the Charter for Compassion).

    If my kids learn that from me, then I think I’ve done my job. It doesn’t matter what else they learn from me. If they grow up to be gentlemen, in the truest simplest definition of the word, then I’ll be happy.

    How are you supposed to end a manifesto? I think I’ll end it with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr, who is on my “expanded” list of moral heroes:

    Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, or retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.