Okay so the call for Ignite Phoenix 3 presentations went out last week. I have been asked by Jeff Moriarty, Alan Dayley and Roger to submit something during the last two Ignite's. I think they probably think I hate them or think Ignite is stupid because not only have I not submitted anything, I failed to even attend. A busy work schedule and active kids has killed my evening both events.
To prove to them that I really think Ignite is one of the coolest things going on in Phoenix and that I really do want to participate. I have put together topic, title, abstracts for things that I think might be fun. To be clear, I am not an expert on most (any?) of these subjects. I just like talking about them with friends, families or inanimate objects. Hell I even dream about some of them at times. So why am I blogging about it? Because I want your feedback. Which of these would you be interested in seeing? Please leave a comment to let me know.
Topic: Swearing Title:The Power and Creativity of the Color Fuck! Abstract:
Swearing can be hilarious or very descriptive. It can illicit responses of laughter, anger or embarrassment. It can shock as well as motivate. There might be no more powerful use of language than profanity. As Shakespeare once wrote, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."
Topic: Social Networks Title:Virus, Host, Transmitter.. What Disease Do You Carry? Abstract:
Many people have a message they wish to transmit. We have heard of this "viral" effect in social media, but how does it really work? Review of the cycle.. Virus injects message into the host... The virus is repackaged and then passed to a new host to infect additional cells for retransmission. How do we create climates that are good for the spread of our viral messages?
Topic: Values Title:It's Not the Technology Dumb-ass Abstract:
In software development people get way too caught up on which technology/approach is being used. When in reality software development is about people not technology. It is important that when developing software that you chose the right values and the technology won't really matter.
Topic: Passion Title:Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys Abstract:
Society teaches us that only careers that produce a large income are worth pursuing. Your mother would encourage you to be a doctor, but probably not a tattoo artist. The truth is that surveys have proven that money is not the key to happiness, often times the exact opposite. So, why are we not exploring what we are passionate about?
Topic: Serendipity Title:I Signed Up to Cure My Hypertension and Ended Up With a 4 Hour Erection Abstract:
Viagra was originally a drug to remove hypertension, but became the best selling impotence drug after nearly all subjects in the study cited significant increase in penile erection. Understanding the ability to use serendipity to your advantage unlocks new doors. But if it's serendipity how do i have any control over it?
Topic: Thinking Title:Be Your Own Neurologist Abstract:
Is it possible to re-wire our brains? Many think so. This is a dive into how people who exhibit high functioning behaviors think. The thought is if you take the time to re-wire parts of your brain to mimic these behaviors you too can benefit. You always wanted a PhD anyways. Right?
Topic: Psychology Title:I Don't Fucking Understand You Abstract:
We all have different chemical make-ups that make us behave differently. We struggle to understand ourselves much less someone with a completely polar personality to ourselves. Archetyping is all the rage, but it's based on fairly old study of patterned behavior.
Topic: Fear Title:Just FUCKING Do It Abstract:
We all have fears to over come. These fears might manifest in the form of procrastination. So how do we move outside the fear and walk into success?
Topic: Irrationality Title:Nothing Defines Humans Better Than Their Willingness To Do Irrational Things in the Pursuit of Phenomenally Unlikely Payoffs. This is the Principle Behind Lotteries, Dating, and Religion. Abstract:
Douglas Adams sums it up well. We act irrationally ALL time while lying to ourselves that we are making perfectly good decisions. Would you walk 10 stores over to save $10? Studies prove you will if the item is $20 but not if its $400. How does the value of $10 change based on the cost of the item? It doesn't. It is completely irrational. Want to know other stupid things you do everyday?
Every year at our Rails Consulting shop Integrum we take from Christmas to New Years off to rejuvenate and recharge. It just so happened that this year Jan 2nd landed on a Friday making for a very awkward return to work. Jade and myself discussed what the best way to use that time would be. We wanted to provide a fun hack like day, but felt that just tinkering on an application or open source product wouldn't be all the fruitful for most people.
So we started brainstorming how we could do something educational, fun, team building and hackish for the day. We talked about picking a few technologies that were new that we wanted to know more about and break the team up and do something using that technology. However, that just felt awkward and wrong. Jade suggested that maybe do it BarCamp style to select what technologies to hack on. Rather than use the technology we thought maybe just learning more about it and reporting back would work best.
Late last night Jade sent a message to the team announcing this new Integrum MofoCamp 2008* format. Completely void of details of course. We prefer the emergent approach to things. We kind of let things roll and ended up with the following format. It seemed to work well.
Everyone assembles and shouts out things they want to know more about. Moderator lists on whiteboard. (15min)
Moderator takes show of hand vote for each item on list. (10min)
Top items are marked for research and roughly equal teams form around topics. (5min)
Teams break up and research the topic they have chosen. (1-2hrs)
All teams reassemble. Each team gets 10 min to present their findings and another 5 min to field questions. (15min per team)
Teams break up and then use the technologies presented to develop something fun. (1hr)
All teams reassemble. Each team gets 5 min to present their newly developed creation. (5min per team)
Everyone goes and drinks beer! (or profit)
We did steps 1-5 before lunch as first half of experiment. We then did steps 1-5 again after lunch and added 6-8. Everyone agreed steps 6-8 were a nice addition. We enjoyed this so much and because of boxed time we feel it would be excellent to do within a Gangplank Hacknight. So expect very soon to see a MofoCamp at Gangplank Hacknight. If it goes well we hope it will be a regular occurrence and that other areas might join in on the collaboration and host their own MofoCamp.
Fig 1. Team doing research via projector round table.
Items that showed up on our list (some of the items got erased so this is not comprehensive). jQuery, CouchDB, Cucumber/Webrat, EC2/S3 and CI/Integrity were the researched topics.
Fig 2. Master list of topics.
*Mofo is short for Mother Fucker.. The term that Integremlins affectionally call each other. Anyone willing to share in the experience of learning something new is also one bad mofo! Therefore it was the only logical name for the event and the format.
I used to be fairly involved in the Free Software Foundation and involved in local GNU/Linux groups. While my focus and energy has changed some in the past 10 years, I still have an affinity for these things. Alan Dayley contacted me asking if Gangplank would be interested in hosting an Open Street Map mapping party. Of course, I said yes without really thinking twice.
A few days before the mapping party I figured I would check out the technology and see if I wanted to attend. I will say I was petrified by the way the site looked and frankly it felt like a bad version of yahoo maps. I ended up having a pretty rough weekend so didn't make it down to the mapping party until Sunday. When I met Brandon, I was brutally honest that I didn't get it. The only thing I could think of that was valuable was making the information free (which is an important thing). Brandon humored me and then enlightened me, like any good evangelist should.
Brandon explained to me that Google maps while very complete doesn't really let you interact with the data. They simply let you plot points on the map, not interact with the map. It clicked at that moment, why having the data be free was so important. Then I was shown the editor behind Open Street Map. On Google maps my neighborhood doesn't exist. It didn't exist on Open Street Maps either but in a matter of five minutes, I was able to map my neighborhood. Now I was excited. Like really excited. The power in being able to create maps is so powerful.
If this wasn't enough, it got better. A lot better. A good friend Todd Huffman dabbles in the mobile space and does a lot of GiS related mobile device stuff. I had invited his partner to meet with Brandon over the weekend and was feeling bummed that he didn't make it. Minutes before Brandon was about to head out to the airport, Todd called asking if there was still a chance to meet up. Todd shared with me that he was already very familiar with the product. In fact, during his trip to Afghanistan he had mapped several villages and wanted feedback on whether he was doing it correctly.
Now the impact of this product really hit home. In the United States we take maps and their readily available access for granted. Here you have someone making digital maps for areas that have no maps available outside of military/government means. Now this project becomes impossible for me to ignore and why I'm blogging about it now. I urge you. Please, go create an account and map your neighborhood. Brandon will be back in January and it is important that you show up.
People often ask why we didn't locate in downtown Phoenix when we moved Gangplank. I always try to be polite with my response (or usually I do). However, the truth is because we feel that downtown Phoenix is dead. It has been for a long time. Twenty years of pouring money into it hasn't changed much. Now before you go and label me a hater (which I am), I will say that I worked for nearly ten years at the heart of downtown.
While I remain in love the the concept of a vibrant downtown, those ten years taught me that our downtown is a lost hope. It is bustling with people from 7am to 4pm, Monday through Friday, but then it turns into the proverbial ghost town. Light rail or billions of dollars in cash infusions won't change this. Adding skyscrapers and professional sports arenas certainly hasn't.
The problem is Phoenix is where people from high rent places like Chicago, California, etc come to own a piece of the American dream (land/home ownership) or from the mid-west where rural (space) is a way of life. The people dwell by choice in our suburbs. In order for downtown Phoenix to not be dead, it has be inhabited by the people currently choosing the edges. I don't see this happening on a scale large enough to make an immediate difference.
So back to Gangplank, there is a myth that if you centrally locate you attract a large base of the greater community. The problem is downtown Phoenix has NO PEOPLE, making it effectively the center of "bullshit and nowhere". West or East side residents have little interest in driving 30 to 50 miles nor do North or South residents, when the destination is nowhere. Metro Phoenix is now big enough that picking a side actually yields better results than picking the uninhabited middle. Yes, I'm sure I have pissed several people I respect off by now, but signs that the current movement is failing yet again are written all over the wall. This economy is not helping. Both the USA Today : "Pain on Main Street: Timing proves bad for Phoenix" and Arizona Republic : "Developers scale back $900 million CityScape project in Phoenix" ran articles on the subject lately.
While there are many locals that remain hopeful like Sam : "Deserted After Dark" and Tyler : "The State of Downtown Phoenix...". Let's face it, when a downtown ambassador employed by merchants to assist visitors, says he often sends tourists to Scottsdale and Tempe when they ask about night life. Then states, "It's a ghost town.". That's a pretty strong sign that there are serious problems with the current formula. I love metro Phoenix (including its downtown) and I hope that I am wrong, but as of now I'm not willing to gamble my money on it.
Before you respond.. Do you live in downtown Phoenix? If not, why? If so, do you have a spouse and kids? For now I would classify downtown approx. 19th Ave to 24th Street between Thomas and Buckeye (16 or so square miles).
About five months ago I was asked by Brian Shaler to do a presentation at Social Media Club. It felt awkward for me. I didn't feel part of the Social Media scene and I wasn't even sure what it was. I did think that perhaps speaking about community would be a good fit. We were moving along with Gangplank and it was something that had been occupying a lot of my mental attention. I decided to make a quick mind map to see if I could come up with something to present.
From this map I created an outline. Unfortunately, I have since tossed out that document. From that outline I was able to create the following presentation.
Lately, I have been trying to understand how my mind processes information, in hope that I can become more effective digesting a wider stream of data. I am consciously trying to save more artifacts used in my thought process for future study and reflection, but that is a whole other post.
This last Friday I was all set and ready to go to Tempe Nerds lunch and then I got a tweet saying that the Geek 'n' Eat was also on the same day. How great is Phoenix that we now have multiple events that are vying for an audience large enough to support them all? Since I really believe in trying to centralize the creative space and practice the art of collaboration, I decided to support my friends at Open Rain and walk down the street to Pacific Seafood Buffet to get both my geek and my eat on. Yes, I said WALK. Despite conventional wisdom, a city is what you make it, not what others perceive it!
It was great to see all of Integrum show up to the event and have great conversation and meet people from as far as Texas. I hope that you find it in you to get out and go to the next local event that sounds interesting to you. Not only will you get a lot out of it, but you will be encouraging others to continue putting themselves out there for the community. Thanks to both Sean and Preston for being there to build the Phoenix community.
I have been meaning to blog about the success and failures that we are having at Integrum doing Agile Development. First let me say that anything you ever find in this blog related to agile probably did not come directly from me. It came from those that have gone before us and have been gracious enough to share. It is my hope that in sharing our experiences that others can build better teams from seeing our failure and our success.
Earlier this week I did part one of a story writing workshop that I will talk more about later (after I finish the series). It seemed to go fairly well and pretty much 98% of all the content came from the teachings, writings and discussions had with probably the greatest user story writer of our time, Mike Cohn. If you do not own User Stories Applied go buy it right now.
So this morning while waiting to see the surgeon, I was reading my news feeds and read James Shores blog article about Retrospectives. While I had seen this while reading his book The Art of Agile Development it was the incredible poster that made me attracted to this post.
We have been alternating every week who runs our retrospective and it has been a long time since I did one. I knew this was the thing I needed to encourage me to push us into a deeper retrospective, so I volunteered to run this weeks retrospective. I won’t recap the details of what was done, read the article and buy the book for the details. :)
I did capture a brief glimpse of mute mapping by the team on video and am including below.
When we were done mute mapping it was clear that communication/respect was the winner on what needed to be the focus of the objective. The team came up with a list of guidelines/points that are important for communication/respect. We have made a giant poster with this list of items to help keep us in check.
Here is the list:
Integrum Guide to Communication and Respect
Actively LISTEN to each other
Planning happens with ALL members of the team
Deal directly with people to solve problems
Be aware of WHAT you say and HOW you say it
Rally wagons at first sign of problems
Communicate Roles
Communicate EARLY and OFTEN
Be RESPONSIBLE for what is expected (demos, standups, timekeeping, planning, etc)
Acknowledge and understand different points of view
Stay on point during discussions
Make time to communicate
The best part is that we had a discussion on our interviewing process immediately following the retrospective and we already saw a huge improvement in communication during that quick meeting. Some personal take aways I have are.
Making the retrospective a game helps people get involved.
Uncomfortable silence can help surface problems.
Brainstorming with out expectations of what will be done with the data lends to more transparent sharing.
Mute mapping can be fun and is highly effective to quickly organizing data.
Stating the prime directive* and grouping things by what was done instead of who did what reduces the feeling of being attacked.
Good healthy conversation lets you tackle/resolve problems in a very calming way.
If you are an agile shop, share your experiences with retrospectives!
This is a community call out. We need to more actively share our stories.
So we have all heard the phrase KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid. In fact, Jim Weirich gave a good presentation at Mountain West Ruby Conference with three slides to hit home the point. Thanks Jim! In talking with a customer the other day they used the phrase in jest that we need to Keep It Fisher Price Block Stupid. Since I have three kids that all made it out of the toddler stage the visual imagery of fisher price blocks hit home.
How often do we say someone is trying to put a square block in a round hole? As software artisans how do we design Fisher Price Block Stupid software that works with the user instead of against the user? But wait, we need Fisher Price Block Stupid tool in order to rapidly develop software. Seriously, when I look at agile, it so Fisher Price Block Stupid (on the surface).
Okay before I get flamed.. Agile is also a black art one can never master. I hope to make a blog post soon that reconciles how something can be simple yet complex at the same time. Until then I challenge you to make everything you do Fisher Price Block Stupid.
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