personal
Communion
My daughter made her first communion this weekend and fulfilling an ambition she’s had since she was three, she can now get snack at the end of the service.
She is my daughter and by definition the most beautiful creature I’ve ever known.
I’m a tolerant dissenter from her Catholic experience but I wont stand in the way of my wife’s love or community and ritual in her day to day lifeexperience.
I will also gladly take a day to celebrate my daughter’s capacity for good and the hope I feel when I look in her eyes.
Posted: June 1st, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
The next big thing
The hot topic in the scrum community is scale.
Size may offer more opportunity (it may not) but it demands overhead and compromise.
Necessity forces us to skip to advanced topics but there are so many fundamentals to master:
- recruiting and developing talented and diverse individuals,
- forming collaborative and highly productive teams,
- crafting ambitious work at sustainable pace,
- excellence, invention, and joy that benefits ourselves, our peers, our customers, and end users.
I’m not as interested in learning how to work with more people as I am in learning how to invent valuable software really, really well.
Posted: May 23rd, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
Chasing Rainbows?
My life feels a little circular these days. Two job changes in four months.
During both searches, I asked myself the same questions.
- Limit my search to [agile] shops?
- Yes.
- What do I mean by [agile]?
- Scrum project management with the XP discipline.
- Empowered, accountable product owners.
- Collaboration and reflection.
- User-centered product development.
Why such a narrow search?
- I want to accomplish something.
- I want to be inspired by my work and my co-workers.
- I want to be part of a real team
- I want to have fun.
- I want to balance my work and my personal life.
I don’t claim my criteria are the only way to achieve these ends but they are my path to them.
Posted: May 22nd, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
Zip it
Bush Assails ‘Appeasement,’ Touching Off Storm
“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have an obligation to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement.”
– George Bush
“I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism”
– Barack Obama
Anti-diplomatic, non-negotiation…
Posted: May 20th, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
New York Health & Safety
Another New York construction accident.
The city routinely asks it’s citizens to thread by, below and through construction. Cranes fall on houses, steel falls in ball fields.
With fallible commuter logic we do our part by filing under half-assembled scaffolding or pinning ourselves between heavy equipment and heavy traffic. Why don’t we cross the street? Go around the block?
I once shared the crosswalk at 9th Ave and 15th St with a 30″ pavement cutter. A utility crew worked it’s way across the intersection in bursts, cutting with the light in front of cars and along side pedestrians.
Life is cheap compared to the city’s evolution and our urgent routines.
Posted: May 18th, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
On to other things
As Jeremy Miller and Wendy Friedlander wrote, new jobs don’t always work out.
At only two months, let’s consider my last gig a walking shapiro.
Fortunately, my second hunt of the year went well thanks to peers in the NY Scrum and XP community.
This is a good time for experienced agilists and I’m grateful to provide for my family and aspire to fulfilling, collaborative work.
Even if things don’t always work out.
I start my new, new job in June.
Posted: May 14th, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
When buses collide
I took this picture at the Scrum Gathering in London last November. The white bus may have impacted gently but makes for a profound impediment.
Since that time, my career has made about as much forward progress as that red bus. This should change soon. More later.
Posted: May 8th, 2008 under personal.
Comments: none
Executive manager, software developer, father and husband trying to do more good than harm.
