malvasia bianca

I gave a talk at work recently riffing on Test-Driven Development, Getting Things Done, and what they have in common, and I think it went pretty well? So I got permission to distribute the slides externally; I put in pretty thorough speaker’s notes, so hopefully they make sense without the recording. Anyways, here are the […]

A little while back, I wrote some about the pros and cons of deliberate practice, as per the book Range. Deliberate practice works well if you’re working on something with a clear goal, where you have fast and accurate feedback loops; but if you’re not working in a domain like that, then deliberate practice might […]

A few years back (probably a decade back, by now?) I wrote some software to help me memorize Japanese vocabulary, by doing time-spaced repetition. And it was also an excuse to play around with Ruby and with Rails. I’ve been using that software ever since: sometimes a little more diligently and sometimes a little less […]

One theme that constantly comes up in Tai Chi classes is keeping control over where your center of gravity. At any point in the form, you should know whether your weight should be completely over your right foot, completely over your left foot, somewhat on the right side, somewhat on the left side, etc. You […]

A quote from Anil Dash’s article about Fog Creek’s new project management tool, Manuscript: Be opinionated: Manuscript has a strong point of view about what makes for good software, building in best practices like assigning each case to a single person. That means you spend less time in meetings where people are pointing fingers at […]

David Chapman has, among other things, been writing about modes of approaching meaning, in a way that’s informed by Robert Kegan’s developmental psychology. He’s written a summary of this recently on one of his blogs, and he discusses it frequently on Meaningness (see e.g. this post and posts it links to), but I thought he […]

At Agile Open California this year, Volker Frank led a session about developing leaders within an agile organization. And it got me thinking: one way to lead is to see a possibility more clearly than anybody else, to describe that vision in a way that helps others see its beauty, and to help guide people […]

(This post was informed by a session at Agile Open California; many thanks to Llewellyn Falco and Matthew Carlson for their discussion and suggestions. But if there’s something in here that sounds wrong to you, blame me, not them!)   Agile software development has always had a strong focus on your software being correct. At […]

Nine years ago, I was thinking about how Amazon Prime enables a more lean approach towards purchasing: if you that you can get whatever you want in two days, then you don’t have to buy things until you need them. For example, I can take a kanban approach towards book buying: if I don’t read […]

It’s months since GDC, and I’m still trying to unpack my feelings about Brenda Romero’s Jiro Dreams of Game Design talk. Or maybe not so much my feelings about it—it’s an excellent talk, no question—but my emotional reactions to it. Her talk confronts concepts that I care about (greatness, team structure, creation) in contexts that […]

I play a lot of Android: Netrunner at work; other board games, too, but Netrunner is the one that’s sunk its teeth into me most deeply. I mostly play over lunch, but sometimes I play at other times, and occasionally those lunches get pretty long; this makes me wonder: is there any way I can […]

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started to appreciate retrospectives in a way that I hadn’t before: I’d felt for a while that they made sense intellectually, but I was never actually good at them. And, while that hasn’t particularly changed (fortunately, other people on teams I’ve been on are better at them!), I […]

It probably would surprise people who have interacted with me recently to hear it, but I actually spent a fair amount of time a few years back trying to get good (as an individual, as part of a team) at estimating: reading the literature (both agile and otherwise), trying it out, and refining and repeating […]

Since my role shift at work, I’ve been thinking about teams: partly being surprised by my reactions to some interactions, partly thinking about ways in which my instincts are a bad fit for some aspects of our house style. And three questions about organizational team structure (in general, not about my current job) that I’ve […]

I really have fallen off of my blogging rhythm ever since getting back from vacation: the trip left me somewhat sleep-deprived, somewhat frazzled, and with a sequence of small “I finished a game” posts that I felt that I had to get out of the way. That combined to get me out of sync; I’ve […]

Merlin Mann’s Back to Work podcast recently did a five-part series on GTD (starting with episode 95); good to have an excuse to think about that again, to have my eyes opened to ways in which I can improve my GTD practice. One thing which particularly struck me while listening to the series was the […]

I tend to think of agile as a way of thinking about programming that’s very supportive of individuals, their quirks, desires, and autonomy. As I’ve been tossing some of the ideas behind this post around in my head, though, I’m not entirely sure why I have that attitude. Certainly the lean pillar of Respect for […]

At Agile Open Northern California 2012, I led a session titled “Worries as Inventory: Bug Trackers, Lean, and GTD”. I put up my notes on the conference wiki, but I’m reproducing them here for archival purposes as well. Many thanks to the people who participated in the session, they did a wonderful job of getting […]

I went to PSL last month; it was a great experience, and the only reason why I haven’t blogged about it here is that there was so much to think about that I haven’t managed to wrap my brain around it. (Well, that’s not the only reason: I’ve been distracted. But it’s the main reason!) […]

From Thomas Cleary’s introduction to his translation of Zen Lessons: In contrast to the relatively plain and straightforward Zen literature of the Tang dynasty, Song dynasty Zen literature is convoluted and artful. This is not regarded, in Zen terms, as a development in Zen, but as a response to a more complex and pressured society […]