bits o' erinql

The Definitive List of CultureHacking Books - FreeStandingAgility.com

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:55:51 -0500

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

#Appleton this is the place to have your car work done. ...

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:46:57 -0500

#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!

Current “reading”: Makers by Cory Doctorow. Also,...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:52:12 -0500

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

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

Sat, 04 May 2013 07:30:16 -0500

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

Ouch. And yet charming :)

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

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:02:02 -0500

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.

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

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:30:19 -0500

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!

Mycelium Digital: a credit-card sized, self-organizing,...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:30:01 -0500

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 :)

Watch one my introductions on Agile, recorded live with the...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0500

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.

Be mindful, or TDD can bypass your brain

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:30:03 -0500

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.

Wringing out Water in Space - for Science! (by...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 07:30:17 -0500

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

Niknak: FOSS JSON REST API for digital stores · GitHub

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 07:30:10 -0500

Niknak: FOSS JSON REST API for digital stores · GitHub:

From the Developer’s comments on Reddit:

This isn’t directly related to the meshnet, but I’m trying to make something that will make it really trivial to set up independent stores online, which helps facilitate not only my business, but that of others in the mesh internet business. Everything is designed with freedom in mind, from Mozilla Persona login to Bitcoin support to “buying things over the command line” friendliness.

Aside from my own store, one of the things I’m really hoping to push as a use case is “purchased free software.” I’m always looking for ways to make free software more financially viable, and I think a great way is to have a standard mechanism for “paying” for a distro if you feel like it. Software can add a directory in /opt/purchase containing their Niknak store information, which the “purchase” script can then detect when run. Purchasing software puts a cryptographic receipt in the appropriate directory, as well as any other digital goodies the author wishes to put in there. This makes it easy to fund your installed software piece-by-piece after you decide you like it, or all at once for your entire distro.

I’ve gotten as far as the permissions model. I’d love for everyone’s feedback on the API so far.

Selling Agile

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:30:00 -0500

Selling Agile:

Bill Nazzaro from DevelopMentor shares his experiences, working with the top 5 misconceptions/concerns about Agile:

Agile teams don’t do long-range planning or estimating.
Agile doesn’t work for matrixed teams or organizations.
Agile doesn’t work for non co-located teams.
Agile expects too much involvement from the customer.
Agile works on a time and materials (T&M) basis.

Bill’s PDF presents some solid thoughts to consider for each point - great conversation starters to practice with your company leaders.

How To Sell Agile To Fixed Bid Contract Clients

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:54:59 -0500

How To Sell Agile To Fixed Bid Contract Clients:

Between the article and the comments, there are four approaches listed here. The first two emphasize a business-partner relationship over a client-vendor relationship:

Target-Scope model: as scope is added or removed, it is done at 50%.
Target-Cost model: see the article

The two from the comments section are more of a prove-yourself-trustworthy model, not necessarily asking for the client to put skin in the game:

Small project, few iterations: I find this one challenging, because it’s difficult for a new team to reach the mean velocity in less than 6 iterations. On the other hand, if it works, and nothing about the team changes for the next contract, then they are bound to only show improvement.
Discovery Doc first, Development second: this was the model we used at Nth Penguin. Essentially, it takes Iteration 0 (aka the Architectural stuff) and makes it a separate, charge-able project. I recommend doing it in a week or less, to demonstrate speed and demonstrate the practice of things to come. The Discovery Doc doesn’t address the client’s involvement, but now there’s room to use a Target-Scope or Target-Cost approach for the second contract, and some trust has already been earned.

MIT and Harvard engineers create graphene electronics with DNA-based lithography | ExtremeTech

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:30:14 -0500

MIT and Harvard engineers create graphene electronics with DNA-based lithography | ExtremeTech:

Cool? T2? You decide…

The video provides interesting animation, but not much information yet - I’m assuming it isn’t self-assembling…

jQuery Best Practices - CodeProject

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:30:23 -0500

jQuery Best Practices - CodeProject:

Quick advise on proper selecting, caching, detecting if element exists, turning your code into a jQuery plugin, local storage, live event handlers (puts event handlers on elements loaded after initial declaration), cloning vs. extending, testing for hidden… and more.

Unit testing tutorial | Automation testing | Developing the future

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:30:23 -0500

Unit testing tutorial | Automation testing | Developing the future:

A quick read to introduce Unit Testing by example, using MSTest and 3 different ways to create a mock object (including using the moq framework).

Breaking the 1000ms Time to Glass Mobile Barrier (by...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:28:00 -0500

Breaking the 1000ms Time to Glass Mobile Barrier (by MarakanaTechTV)

Details on designing for the time-delays of network and browser rendoring, and also how the page is built.

Some great stats in here based on Google experiments when slowing down their search engine page on purpose, like the 3 categories of experience that happen between 1000ms and <100ms.

Update: great summaries in this video on solving the issue, including code construction solutions. Ilya Grigorik’s new book High Performance Browser Networking is available to read for free, currently in production at http://bit.ly/browser-networking.

"Glucose homeostasis improved in response to a reduced caloric diet, with a greater effect observed..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:53:47 -0500

“Glucose homeostasis improved in response to a reduced caloric diet, with a greater effect observed in the absence of surgery as compared with after RYGB [Roux-en-Y gastric bypass].”

- Rapid Improvement of Diabetes After Gastric Bypass Surgery

It’s not the surgery - it’s the diet. Also see the movie: Forks Over Knives.

Bitcoin price goes on wild ride - Apr. 3, 2013

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:59:06 -0500

Bitcoin price goes on wild ride - Apr. 3, 2013:

What is it worth to just get that hard drive fixed, anyway? Rescue your coins already!

#DHMN | Survey results at UW-EC on Makerspace interests

Fri, 18 May 2012 06:03:53 -0500

#DHMN | Survey results at UW-EC on Makerspace interests:

As the treasurer of DHMN, I of course am looking at the total proposed monthly dues from 194 people:

14474%2$11-$20

3418%3$21-$30

105%4$31-$40

32%5$41-$50

21%6>$50

11%Total

194

At an average, that’s $527+255+106.50+91+50 = $1029.50 / month to support 50 people.

Paying more for 24hr access:

1Yes, any amount!

53%2Yes, but no more than $10 more.

8041%3Yes, but no more than $20 more.

3116%4No, I’m fine with set access hours.

7840%Total

194

Considering the number of people who would pay more for 24 hr access is double the rate of those who would pay anything at all, we’ll just take 50% of that value, so $200+465 = $665.

So that’s $1694.50, based on a group of 200 surveyed (assumed) college students that we don’t know how they were invited…. hmmmm…… still hopeful!

I say we start a Space-building regular membership fee via http://dhmn.net !