This iteration marked another iteration of attending retrospectives with a twist… up until now I had guest facilitated other teams as well as my own team’s retrospectives, but this week I facilitated one team while someone else facilitated mine. Some interesting patterns arose, and I’ll delve into them a bit after describing the two retros.
Apparently, you can now sign up an account on Google App Engine without any problems. NICE!!! 
Edit: No… it is not open… but it is open for a limited number of new sign ups.
I’ve stated several times in the past that being a software developer today involves so much more than just being able to whip up code… it involves having great interpersonal skills, an ability to work with domain experts / customers, being very communicative, etcetera etcetera.
Anyhow, here’s a few ways in my opinion to make yourself not fit in on a team.
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Lately we’ve been trying to improve our retrospective format, moving away from the as hoc “More Of, Same Of, Less Of” and into something more engaging and useful. For this goal, I’ve been applying the pattern outlined in the excellent Agile Retrospectives book:
The initial feedback i got on Set The Stage was that it felt like a waste of time… this usually includes activities like asking participants what is one word they’re thinking of coming into the retrospective or other things to get them into focus mode. Since we’re pressed for time and didn’t get much value from this activity, we dropped it in favor of a just quick overview of the agenda.
Anyhow, after facilitating a few retrospectives using this format for my team, we branched out and tried it with other teams. The idea we’ve been having is to have someone from another team facilitate a team’s retrospective, allowing all members to participate rather than one being somewhat removed. This week I facilitated retrospectives for three teams, two of which had customers joining over teleconference from the other side of the country. The results were pretty interesting and below I have included my notes of the last two that I did.
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Alright. Let’s face the truth… developers totally suck when it comes to designing good user interfaces. No I take that back… when it comes to designing even half way decent user interfaces. I remember the first ptoject I ever had, adding secure payment processing to a website cobbled together by someone who was a developer… nice, hot pink text on a turtle green background. Bleh!
Recently I came across the UI Pattern Factory site, and it has helped TREMENDOUSLY with improving the design and layout of the new product I’ve been working on. Remember… good UI design isn’t just for good looks, but proper layout makes an application much more functional.
Anyone else have other good UI themed sites to share?
Edit: I also wanted to note that there is also an excellent UI Pattern site out there as well.
I’ve been trying out Cuil, a new search engine that launched recently by a few ex-googlers. And I like it. What I like the most is that it is very very on the dot when it suggests related categories to browse. The user interface is also very slick, smooth, and fast.
Will it move near the top? Maybe. Replace Google? Probably not. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.
This Tuesday after next, August 12th, will be the first meetup I’m organizing for social media enthusiasts at the Artisan. The meetup is pretty much open to everyone in Mid Missouri who has a blog or twitter account, regardless of whatever topics you may tweet or blog about. We’ll get started around 6:30 and wrap up around 8:30 or 9. Come on by and hang out for a few! 
This will be part social gathering, part social networking, and I hope will result in very interesting discussions. Although it’s centered around new/social media, we can chat about anything of interest!
Hope to see a few local tech enthusiasts there!
Reg recently posted an Ayn Rand quote that has got me thinking:
When the productive have to ask permission from the unproductive in order to produce, then you may know your culture is doomed.
So very very true.
Just came across this little surprise on Refactoring HTML while browsing Martin Fowler’s site today… got to say I’m both surprised and not surprised a book like this came out.
First off not surprised since refactoring HTML is fairly common. A lot of times with legacy sites I find myself doing “Replace Presentational Table With Semantic Markup and CSS” (dunno if it’s in the book, I just made it up) refactorings all the time. Also taking display related HTML and breaking it into more semantical markup is a common strategy I’ve done… as well as applying microformats.
Surprised because I guess it’s a daring book to write for the crowd that consumes the Martin Fowler Signature Series books. From my experience the majority of Java, Ruby, and .NET folks usually pay no heed to HTML… they either delegate this task to a designer or dump a bunch of slop (like a table to center some text) that “just works” while focusing on the back end code. These are the same types you’ll find dropping self closing BR tags in HTML 4.01 documents or being clueless about what a doctype actually is. ARGHHH!!! (I’ll stop ranting)
Anyhow, I’m definitely queuing this one up and checking it out. Maybe I’ll find some new useful strategies for cleaning up stinky, fragile HTML.
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