Over the falls

The guys at Surity , who are running our week long PM workshop have some excellent skills and resources when it comes to project mangement. (don't let their appalling website fool you. It's true - the blink tag lives!) I've learned a whole bunch of really valuable stuff, and it's made me re-consider what I think the really important elements in project management are. So, I'm going to blat them out here. Incoming! Build a Great Team I still think that there is more to be gained from optimizing the team rather than the process. That idea intrigues me - maybe because you can't fill in a template for a great team...most of the focus at this workshop has been around contractors and software deployment management - where you don't get to pick the team, and you have to deal with whoever the customer sends. In an ISV software project , you can choose the team that you want to run a project. It sounds totally obvious, but If you want great software, this is the si...

Stilly is having trouble keeping up with his blog feeds. I was having the same problem, but now I've got it down to under half an hour. (Around 300 posts a day) My suggestion - use onfolio and create a newspaper with all your feeds, skim through them and click the reading tray icon for stuff that looks vaguely interesting, and mark the rest as read. Then browse the reading tray at your leisure. Oh, and if you want to read some real death by blog posts, subscribe to the blog of death. Unfortunately, it tends to be somewhat depressing...

Spent the day in a project mangement workshop with the aim of refining and improving our PM methodologies. I've never been in a room with so many project mangers before - Admittedly I was the only one with a software development background - the rest of the guys are all your more standard IT deployment/change mangement folk. Some idle thoughts: Maybe this PM stuff is one great big marketing beanie that you pull over the head of prospective customers and yell "Look How Professional I am!" Project Managers by their very nature tend to be control freaks. Just a few weeks ago I was making a joke about old school managment, where you make a plan and nobody believes it except for you, and then everybody lies to you so you can tick boxes on a schedule that became irrelevant as soon as you wrote it. I think most waterfall development methodologies suffer from this problem. But, the agile methodologies suffer from a fuzzy level of schedule that means you can't plan very far ...

The friendly folk over at Apple developer relations lent us a G5 for our project. (Our code looks like it will run on pretty much any platform, and now we know it will run on OSX...) Really, the amount of developer drool in my cubicle is obscene. And it's not at all unfounded. It sure is a fancy machine. And the 20" cinema display is simply the best one I've ever seen. If I had 7,000 spare dollars I'd buy one... At work we use TRIM for tracking bugs - It's super extensible, and has all the features available in any bug tracker(plus a gazillion more) . But, the amount of legacy theory and added complexity made me investigate what other alternatives are available. BugTracker.NET is a great, open source variant that looks to me to be heavily inspired by FogBugz. If you need a quick free windows bug tracker - or even if you're considering FogBugz - you should check it out. Given that Joel Spolsky seems to be building some kind of developer nirvana over there ...

Had to post this picture of me and my brother clowning around on the headland: Ruby's caption was better: "Gordon and Graeme Practice for the K-Mart Catalogue"

If you were wondering what's on TV in California, check out Google video . Apparently they're indexing the supetext captions that are transmitted in the black bits of our TV channels. Man - those guys are developing a finely tuned indexing radar. If there's content anywhere, (even flying through the atmosphere!) -seems they'll find a way to index it. This makes me speculate on the future of companies that have profited for years by providing structured storage (FileNET,Documentum, OpenText, TOWER Software) etc. I mean, when you can triumphantly return with exactly what you wanted from a big pile of random stuff, do you really need to structure it properly? Let's use the following half-baked analogy: My study is full of vaguely important pieces of paper. Becuase deep down I hate all of them, I tend to treat them fairly carelessly. This means I generally just chuck them through the study door in order to minimize the amount of time I have to spend thinking about them....

In an effort to replace our previously massacred chickens, I built a new chook house on the weekend. I bought a new angle grinder for the princely sum of 19 dollars, and got a little carried away... Seriously, who would make an angle grinder for 19 dollars? (If I made one, I'd charge you a fortune for it...) anyway, lots of loud sparky fun. My god you get dirty when you brush five years of crusted on chook poo into a fine dust haze... I thought I had a great tan until I started to sweat.. and my nose cleared.... As yet no word from Stilly -I'm afeared that Microsoft may indeed have lured him to his doom. Simon has some interesting Newspaper Clippings that may shed some light on his blogging silence.

EW! My mouse is covered in tomato sauce. Wireless mouses are a bad, bad thing. If this mouse had a cable, nobody would've put it on a plate of tomato sauce. It does explain it's slow, gooey movement however. That's one problem solved. Rory wants to visit. I wonder if I can convince TOWER to bring him out for our next conference? A lunatic in a bunny suit can only be good for business. My good friend Stilly (Stillbert as he's affectionately known) is off to Seattle to see if he can get "a job" at Microsoft. (My other friend, Simon thinks that it's really part of a grand plan to collect all the linux hackers and detonate them . ) For some strange reason I had this vision of a giant penguin dancing down Microsoft Way playing a pan pipe, with a crowd of pasty linux nerds in a conga line bhind him... "Yeah - we saw this cool Tux , and like we followed him coz he was dancing down the road in front of the campus at Microsoft." And then ...

I really really really want one of these . And isn't that just the greatest bit of flash marketing you've seen for a while? Or am I just such a nintendo fanboy that I think it's all good regardless...

Thinking about this previous post led me to question how easy it is to fool people. Following the architecture astronaut mentality this led me to abstract all human behaviour thus: Seems to my potty head that everything that people work on can be summed up in these two things - Policy and Marketing. Policy is what people do, what they will do and so on - Marketing is how they will percieve what gets done. Now, we all know that perception is easier to manipulate than reality - it's much easier for me to convince you that I had a wee on the top of Mount Kocsziusco than to actually do it. Add to this the generalisation that all people are fundamentally lazy. So they often tend to work more on perception than reality. Which is why it's occasionally easy to fool people. In my line of work, I work with a bunch of engineers. I like engineers. One of the things I like about them is that they don't do bullshit. They only care about what really gets done. (Often this ma...

Miles Davis had an album called MilesTones . I always thought that was pretty cool. We finally hit our first major milestone at work yesterday - the M1 milestone was based around getting an established codebase and tools completed - test and communications plans and a production environment along with processes for promotion. Here's me thinking that the development methodology we're using is all fancy pants and unique, (and that maybe one day I could write a book about it and retire to Barbados), when some irritating JoS Poster mentioned something called SCRUM . SCRUM is pretty much the development methodology we're following on Project Tremble. We've got all the good bits of XP, the good bits from MSF, and none of the silliness. We're having daily 10 minute meetings instead of a weekly breifing. We're pretty much answering the three SCRUM questions daily (although not so formally). The thing that really doesn't sit quite well with me about these ag...