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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”. ...

Ever since Barcamp I’ve been shopping for a personal laptop for general use as well as a development machine that I could use for work. Our work issued machine is a loaded mac powerbook. With a unix core osx has given me much of the power that I used to enjoy when I’d used linux as a primary os. However Apple is not doing wonders for free software and I felt the need to get back to my roots and move back to Linux. ...

When wrapping up the VIm talk @trevmex mentioned that people share their dotFiles on github. This blew my mind. I can sit in front of anyones desk and start using their eclipse and immediately be productive. The secret to VIm is the years of refactoring the configuration and shortcuts, known as the dotFiles. You probably couldn’t even execute a mapped command on my machine since I map the leader based on my keyboard. ...

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”. ...

Every year Philly’s BarCarmp gets better. Last year I met great people and learned new tactics from my peers. This year I enjoyed a number of roundtable discussions where we taught each other and had my core paradigms challenged. (of couse still met great people, but that is implied) The day opened last night with a fantastic hosted party @indyhall. It had a vibe that reminded me of my college days where the future was bright and everyone you talked to has excitement around what they were doing. I loved being surprised by people. Even the kids from Phillymagic had more going on then I would have thought. First off the magician was a Rensselar student and I was saddened to learn the bars I institutionalized as a student were no longer in vogue. More importantly he was not just flipping cards for pay, he is building out an online hub for magicians to fill a market need that he noticed. I’m barely through my first tequila and completely impressed by this fellows accomplishments in building a passive income stream is a business he loves. ...