Professional

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I’ve devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I’m interested in. I’m spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and tree hash. I grabbed my trusty python, dulwich (native python-git library) and gave it a shot. After a few minutes writing complicated looking recursive code I jumped over to irc where the friendly author pointed me to a convenience function that does what I needed. ...

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me. We are at a point in this iteration where I have too many stories in progress and it is taking a few extra days to get work completed and accepted. This does not concern me greatly since this is a new team and it usually takes a few turns to get into a rhythm. I was walking down the hall and one of developers said that things are going ‘Awesome’. I said “Great, but awesome is not a metric”. ...

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot. The tenants of Jugaad resonate with me as a more general philosophy about how to get things accomplished then Agile’s focus on “working software”. ...

Came across the Heinlein quote again today: http://personalmba.com/core-human-skills this time in the context of a “Business” professional. There is another point made in the blog post about how to be successful. You can either be an expert in a narrow field (top 1%) or be very good (top 25%) in multiple fields. The author calls these “Core Human Skills” This is worth a read, and I will definitely abstract these concepts out in my interview process. ...

This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture. Given my fictional example even a 100% to 500% cost overrun could happen and keep the “success” label. ...