bits o' erinql

Occasional glimpses at the infinitesimally now that is non-me.

Tue May 14
The Definitive List of CultureHacking Books - FreeStandingAgility.com

This list from FreeStandingAgility.com has been hyperlinked where possible via InfoSoup to the OWLSnet member libraries of Northeast Wisconsin.  If no link exists, there are also Amazon links on the actual article, along with an overview of each book and a cover image.

  • Open Space Technology by Harrison Owen
  • Tribal Leadership by Logan, King  Fischer-Wright
  • The Culture Game by Daniel Mezick
  • Moving Beyond Icebreakers by Stanley Pollack
  • Systems Thinking by Jamshid Gharajedaghi
  • Believe Me by Michael Margolis
  • WorldBlu’s 10 Principles of Organizational Democracy by WorldBlu Leaders
  • Software For Your Head by Jim & Michele McCarthy
  • We The People by Buck, Villines
  • Gamestorming by Gray, Brown, Mancufo
  • Visual Meetings by David Sibbet
  • Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal
  • Delivering Happiness by Tony Hseih
  • The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
  • Mastery by George Leonard
  • How to be a Hacker by Eric Raymond
  • Beyond Empowerment by Doug Kirkpatrick
  • The Reengineering Alternative by William Schneider
  • Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appello
  • An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide by Michael Sahota
  • Recharge Your Team: The Grounded Visioning Approach, by Jay Vogt
  • Closing the Me-You Gap by Vickie Gray
Fri May 10
#Appleton this is the place to have your car work done. I’ve been working with Warner for years, and he recently moved to his own place at 533 N. Richmond across from the EZone. If you’re looking for a mechanic that understands the power of great, honest, affordable service, stop by Neuman’s Auto Repair and ask for his analysis and a quote. Or call Warner at 920.733.2335 It’s worth it!

#Appleton this is the place to have your car work done. I’ve been working with Warner for years, and he recently moved to his own place at 533 N. Richmond across from the EZone. If you’re looking for a mechanic that understands the power of great, honest, affordable service, stop by Neuman’s Auto Repair and ask for his analysis and a quote. Or call Warner at 920.733.2335

It’s worth it!

Mon May 6
Current “reading”: Makers by Cory Doctorow. Also, there’s a coder’s session tonight at the Appleton Makerspace, powered by DHMN

Current “reading”: Makers by Cory Doctorow. Also, there’s a coder’s session tonight at the Appleton Makerspace, powered by DHMN

Sat May 4
Found this posted on reddit, I can only assume by the owner, VivaLaVodkaa Ouch. And yet charming :)

Found this posted on reddit, I can only assume by the owner, VivaLaVodkaa

Ouch. And yet charming :)

Mon Apr 29
Currently reading: Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both

Just started, so at this point I don’t have any comments yet.  This was passed on to me from a former colleague at a credit card company, and it’s always good to know what’s being read by the prospects.

Sun Apr 28
Upcoming free online courses that are starting April 29 from Stanford, MIT, Harvard ~ via Class Central

All of these courses are pretty damn cool at some level, but here’s a few appetizers that might be interesting to people at the Appleton Makerspace (powered by DHMN): 

  • M102; MongoDB for DBAs
  • Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society
  • Introduction to Data Science
  • Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence

As of this post, there are 266 future courses listed, covering Art, Programming, Writing, Finance, Statistics, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Music, Thermodynamics, Communities, Startups, Law, Cryptography… it just keeps going! 

Sat Apr 27

Mycelium Digital: a credit-card sized, self-organizing, peer-to-peer, solar-powered networking device with screen, keyboard and multiple login accounts, for digital currency (by bitcoincard.org)

As you’ll see in the video, it is also heavily integrated with tracking for marketing & sales; sweet for the business owner, potentially sour for the customer.  

Would you get one?  I know a certain makerspace that would love to jailbreak one :)

Fri Apr 26

Watch one my introductions on Agile, recorded live with the prospective client in early 2009… (by me, Erin Quick-Laughlin).

This is the culmination of learning from some of the greats like Dave Hussmann, Scott W. Ambler and Mike Cohn, then practicing  and applying from 2007-2009 at Nth Penugin.  All of this was, as you will tell from the language, prior to getting my CSM.

If you stick around past the 29 minute mark, you’ll also see a demo of WebWidgetry from Ryan Gahl - that was some slick stuff.  I miss it.

Mon Apr 22
Be mindful, or TDD can bypass your brain

I enjoyed this quick example from stoneship.org - Test Driven Development, and unit testing in general, suffer when the developer makes a code change and forgets to exercise the question “Does this change introduce new cases for testing? What could they be?”

Everything changes.  Everything is connected.  Consider existing unit tests to only cover what you know is important to protect so far.  Build time into your estimates to cover what you are doing, or will do.  Dan Rawsthorne of 3back.com teaches that your estimating should only give 70% of your time to user stories - leave the other 30% for chores - and make this transparent to the Product Owner, especially during prioritization.

Rawsthorne would go on to say: If you need to create technical debt on purpose (“we don’t have time to ‘do it right’, otherwise we pay a $10 million dollar fine tomorrow”) then create a Cleanup Story specific to this issue, for the backlog.

Sun Apr 21

Wringing out Water in Space - for Science! (by canadianspaceagency)