malvasia bianca

(Mostly an e-mail to the leandevelopment group, but I figured I might as well stick it here, too.) I just finished reading The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker. Which I highly recommend: it may actually now be my favorite (non-software-specific) lean book. A clear presentation of a good set of principles; I saw a lot […]

Since I felt compelled to type out a long quote for use on a mailing list, I might as well stick it up here, too. This is from Deming’s Out of the Crisis, pp. 128–129, in its chapter on “Diseases and Obstacles”; the blockquote sections are indented in the original. Search for Examples. Improvement of […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

I finished reading The Art of Agile Development, by James Shore and Shane Warden a few weeks ago. It’s a quite good book: if you’re looking for a well-written, prescriptive guide for how to do XP, this is what I would recommend. Though I won’t go into the book in general any more than that. […]

In the spirit of “every long e-mail I send somewhere should be shamelessly recycled on my blog”, I present some random thoughts on testing. Why do we release products with defects that we weren’t aware of? This is a sign of flaws in our testing; two possible causes are: We don’t know what to test […]

About two and a half months ago, I had 89 saved items in my feed reader. I noted that I wasn’t shrinking that number as quickly as I expected, and predicted that, two months later, I’d have shrunk the list by a further 20 items. It’s a more than two later; how am I doing? […]

I’m hiring again. If you live in the S.F. Bay Area, are a good programmer, and want to be the first kid on your block to stream out 320Gbps of video data, please let me know. (You can also submit a resume via the above link.)

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “Do schools kill creativity?” You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.) I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs […]

From 37 Signals’ Getting Real: People often spend too much time up front trying to solve problems they don’t even have yet. Don’t. Heck, we launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers! Since the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a 30-day gap to figure it out. We used that time […]

From Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns (p. 20): Once a set of implementation patterns has become habitual, I program faster and with fewer distracting thoughts. When I began writing my first set of implementation patterns (The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Prentice Hall 1996) I thought I was a proficient programmer. To encourage myself to focus on […]

Some things that have passed through my earphones recently: In a recent lean blog podcast episode, Norman Bodek talked about how great mistakes are, because making a mistake is the best way to learn something. In an episode of The Cranky Middle Manager that I just listened to, Patrick Lencioni talked about how one of […]

I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to each other in some […]

Warning: this post consists of discussion of management of queues that matter only to myself, and is therefore extremely unlikely to be interesting to anybody else. Despite which I insist on writing it, because of my excessive fascination with the effects of and management of queues. Two months ago, when discussing my lists of saved […]

And now to some actual content from Agile Open California. As I mentioned before, I hosted a session called I Don’t Like Pair Programming, since the topic had been on my mind after our team meeting the previous week. The title isn’t really accurate: I usually enjoy pair programming when I’m doing it, but my […]

I spent Monday and Tuesday at the first Agile Open California. I learned several things there, which I hope I’ll find time to blog about over the next couple of days, but I want to start by talking about the format. Actually before getting into the format, I want to talk about the setting. It […]

Deterministic and probabilistic software product management. Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn. Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to […]

I just listened to a great LeanBlog podcast episode on Dr. Sami Bahri, The World’s First Lean Dentist. Really amazing; this guy was unhappy with how his dental practice was going (e.g. very bad on-time performance, very long wait times), did some reading, and thought this lean stuff would help. Despite the fact, of course, […]

Ninja Town. I love the character names. A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.) Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I […]

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going. Still, it’s taken […]

I’m on the fourth chapter of my Japanese textbook now, enough for a new set of difficulties to surface. All of which ring vague bells from a decade ago; I’m trying to do things right this time, which means that I need better strategies for facing these difficulties than I had last time. One problem: […]