Matt O’ Rama

The War Room

A month or so ago one of our VPs moved up to what I call the high class end of the building, where all of the execs are. This left her very nicely sized office open and since we’d recently had to give up one of the conference rooms we’d been occupying for a year, we siezed the day and the office. We got a small projector and “liberated” a long table from our big conference room to make a War Room for the programmers to work together and try to knock out the last of the big problems on our project.

This has been hugely effective. We all have different skills and while we communicate fine normally, having everybody in the same room has taken our game to a whole other level. The other day we took the most dreaded task (adding a vaguely defined new line item into a statement that somebody else wrote) and 2 of the guys worked on the technical aspects of it while I dug into why we needed the line and what it really meant. By the time they had figured out the mechanics of adding the line, I had figured out the logic for what numbers to add up and we got it mostly done in that one day. We had a few smaller details to work out but those are done and so far our Product Owner loves it, and says the customers will love it as well.

I’m not sure we’d want to work like this all the time but having the War Room has certainly been an eye opener for us. We’d thought in the past it might be useful to sit with a projector and work together but hadn’t taken the opportunity. Now we know how valuable it is though and will be doing it again I’m sure. Unfortunately they’re about to fill the office with a new hire but until then, we’re camping out and taking care of business.

Normally our conference rooms have little calendar pages on them to tell you who has reserved the room. Since this one didn’t have one, I made this to tell people the room was occupied. I wanted it to be funny though to hopefully defuse any negativity people might have about not being able to use the room. We haven’t heard much grumbling so I think it succeeded.

My First Agile Project: Go-Live – The Final Frontier

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Picture courtesy of papalars. on flickr

We did it! The project I’ve been talking about all this time has finally gone live and is now being used in production. Pretty much everything worked fine on launch day as well, which was nice. :) In this installment of My First Agile Project, I’ll talk about the last week of the project and where we go from here.

The last weeks of any project are pretty hectic and this was no exception. Our last week was a weird one though as we were theoretically in a code freeze (more on that below), and we still had to finish final testing, and we had to be done by Thursday so our database admins could start the data conversion first thing Friday morning. We all pretty much ran around like chickens with our heads cut off all week but once Friday came a weird sense of calm had settled over most of us (it might have been a fog of fatigue or brain tiredness, it was hard to tell). The DBAs had run through the conversion process 29 previous times so while they were working, it wasn’t some new process. The conversion process ran like clockwork, even finishing a few hours earlier than projected, and on Sunday we began the final Go-Live steps.

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My Agile Team: More Code, More Problems

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Picture courtesy of sa ku ra on flickr

Welcome to the newest installment of My Agile Team, my team’s ongoing series of misadventures in trying to get better at Agile development. This time around, we’re still playing Whack-A-Mole on the list of bugs we’ve encountered since Go Live. We stomp one out, another pops up.

What I’m going to discuss this time is our approach to trying to fix these critical bugs while maintaining at least a semblance of our Agile nature. It’s hard to do a planning meeting and decide on what to work on when you’ve got new things popping up and old things dragging on. Read on for more on how we’re planning in the midst of firefighting production bugs.

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FizzBin!

We need a word that says “I know tech” when you’re on the phone with tech support, you’d just say “Fizzbin” and they’d know.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – FizzBin – The Technical Support Secret Handshake.

Yes, I fully support this idea. I hate having to call tech support and sit through the first 5 pages of the support script but I also feel like a jerk when I have to say “I ran an ISP for 5 years, I know what I’m doing”.

My First Agile Project: The Last Mile

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

Welcome back to My First Agile Project. I spent a few weeks doing as little as possible but now that I’m back at work we’re starting to head toward the actual end of this project. For real this time; barring any natural disasters, stress-induced insanity, or alien invasions we should be live by the end of the month. So the next couple of posts in this series are going to be about the end of My First Agile Project as we complete this and transition to whatever comes next.

As I’ve discussed before, we’ve missed a couple of other deadlines in the past but this one just feels different. On past deadlines, when we thought we were close enough to done we’d find a 3-day weekend and try to decide if we could finish everything by then (converting all of our old data takes a long time so we have to basically shut the company down while we do it). Of course, things come up and we’re too optimistic so when it comes down to it we’ve had to abandon the previous dates. We thought we were going to be able to do it at the end of November but again we missed it due to changes being made at the last minute and unforeseen problems. This time though, our list of remaining issues is small enough that when we decided on this new date we were all a lot more comfortable with it than in the past. This feels like an actual date of completion for everything, not a deadline we’re rushing to meet.

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Evernote API notes

I spent an hour earlier trying to figure out why my Evernote API code was giving an HTTP Error 500 and finally found it. It turns out the code from their example is using old URLs. I’m putting this here so hopefully the next person to google that error will have something to find. If this isn’t you, skip this post. :)

Turns out the correct URL as of 3/15/2009 is sandbox.evernote.com, not lb.evernote.com.

Also, the correct URL for the NoteStore is http://sandbox.evernote.com/edam/note/s1

If this helps, you’re welcome. Hopefully Evernote will fix the docs and nobody will ever need this though.

EDIT: Ok, my bad. I misunderstood the addition of the s1 on the end of the NoteStore URL. That’s the shard id that you’re supposed to get from the User. The forum post I read said just to add that on the end but it looks like it’s safer to get from the User object.

SXSW Interactive ‘09 Tote Bag Design

I know from my last year at SXSW Interactive that 8,000+ tote bags are given out to SXSW Interactive registrants — so I was driven to come up with an amazing design.

In this post I’ll explain the tote bag design process, including some of the challenges we faced through that process and how we came up with a winning solution.

Rohdesign | Mike Rohde, Designer : SXSW Interactive ‘09 Tote Bag Design.

I love when reading through the process a designer goes through. This is a fun look at the process, thought, and luck that goes into something you might not think about, the tote bag given out at South By Southwest this year.

8 rules to discourage your employees

If you are committed to pissing off your employees, but can’t quite find the way to do so, you can follow these rules and achieve success.

via 8 rules to discourage your employees | Geek Stuff Daily.

This is one of those things that’s not funny haha, but funny sad.

I’ve been thinking more and more about management recently after the JavaPosse Roundup. I’ll go into that more later but it’s funny how these kind of management things keep popping up since I’ve come back.

JavaPosse Roundup 09 Day Zero

This week I’m in beautiful Crested Butte Colorado for the JavaPosse Roundup 2009 and so far I’m having a great time. This is the un/open space conference put together by the JavaPosse podcast guys. The point of an open space conference is that there’s no specific agenda so everybody just suggests topics and attends whatever session they want. Today is the first real day of the conference and so far both sessions I’ve been to have been great.

My co-worker Ryan and I got here Sunday night and ended up at the house the Posse guys rented. We all went out to dinner and had a great time. Monday was the Day Zero of the conference where we all gathered at the Posse house and did various coding dojos. I did the JavaFX dojo. We started out the day going through the language and some of the sample projects since only one of us, Tor from the JavaPosse, had any experience with JavaFX. Sometime around lunch we decided to build something real in JavaFX and started working on a countdown timer for use later in the conference lightning talks. We built a timer that counted down and at zero played a rude sound and told the speaker to shut up. Joe from the Posse took on the role of a designer and made some really cool images to make the application look like a real clock. At the last minute we got the images mostly integrated into the application and all that remains is applying some effects we only prototyped. All in all I was very impressed with JavaFX and hope to build some real stuff with it one of these days. I’m planning on working on some visualizations that I would have done in Processing before but look much easier in JavaFX.

More on the Roundup later!

Making Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa

It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. Pick 30 startups that eminent angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars if they’ll relocate to your city, and see what happens after a year. If they seem to be thriving, you can try importing startups on a larger scale.

via Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe..

When I first moved to Albuquerque almost 15 years ago now, I heard talk of it being “Silicon Mesa“. For a giant geek like me, that was exciting talk. Especially since Albuquerque was Podunk as far as I was concerned, having grown up in San Diego. (I don’t think of it that way any more, so you don’t have to send me hate comments.) But that talk was just hype, basically. We have good tech companies here but nothing like a Silicon Valley culture I don’t think.

This idea of Paul Graham’s though, could make Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa.

It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco. Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as “hip” and “tolerant,” or as reflecting “traditional values?” Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home? If you answered yes to all these questions, you might be able not only to pull off this scheme, but to do it for less than a million per startup.

Albuquerque meets all of these criteria, to some extent. We’re tolerant and pretty hip, even according to outsiders like Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class. UNM is a good school, and New Mexico Tech is a great geek school and only an hour away in a city nobody in their right mind wants to live in (sorry Socorro, it’s true). There are a lot of walkable neighborhoods and downtown is coming along nicely. Plus, we have an extremely low cost of living and the weather is livable, even for people like me that grew up in shorts and tshirts.

A plan like this could not only attract startups from outside of New Mexico, but it would certainly help a few startups stay here instead of living for the West Coast. Even for New Mexico, this isn’t a lot of money. Paul talks about giving the startups anywhere from half a million to a million and I think we could do a lot closer to half. That would buy a good standard of living for the founders, and hardware easily. The deal could even include the big data center, BigByte, and give the startups a discount on internet access since they’ll almost certainly be internet companies. Sheesh, give me and some of my friends half a million and we’d have all kind of stuff built in no time. :)

I would absolutely love to see something like this happen, just to get that startup feel in town. That kind of energy would help really get downtown kicked into high gear and would help the areas around UNM as well for sure. Yeah, it would cost millions but unless the absolute wrong startups were chosen, I don’t think it could help but give back to the city.

If one of the 3 people who reads this happens to become the next mayor, get Paul Graham on the phone first thing and get this thing started!