First and foremost, I absolutely love the amount of planning and forethought that goes into each 30-day development sprint. My past two jobs had nothing that even remotely compares to this. One was an online grocery store (which just recently discontinued operations) which meant that most development was done within the demands of an operating e-business and as a result needed to be very seat-of-the-pants. The other was a manufacturing company which meant that development processes were heavily driven by the demands of sales and manufacturing departments and those demands could and would change in the blink of an eye. Needless to say, I have found the change to be very liberating.

That is not to say that we couldn’t do more planning. One of the things that we found working through our first sprint was that while we felt we had done a great deal of planning up front, there was actually a lot of granularity that we were lacking. This is something we are endeavoring to overcome in the planning for Sprint 2. As much as I love the planning sessions we are having and as exciting as I find the whole process, it is a very tiring and draining experience. Well worth it, but wearying nonetheless.

A second major thing that struck me was how well we worked as a team. Considering the fact that five people were placed on a development team, given a couple of weeks to do some research and get to know each other and then thrust into the middle of a very ambitious project, we somehow managed to work very well together. Coupling this with the fact that we are working with a large number of cutting edge technologies, I would have expected at least a little friction to develop somewhere in the team over the course of 30 days, but none did. I believe that this is largely due to the environment at VendAsta and their hiring process. Everyone who gets hired there has to go through a lunch with other developers whom they will be working with. If those devs don’t think that you are a good fit for the team and the company, you don’t get hired. I don’t know why more companies don’t operate this way. People from HR departments should use VendAsta as a case study in how to build a whole company that just “gels”.

Finally, in the past two days I have been very impressed with the manner in which some of the trouble spots from Sprint 1 have been discussed. Previously, I have experienced project post mortems that are nothing more than a gathering of people around a table to point fingers at each other. In our post mortem yesterday we were encouraged to be completely honest and frank about what we did and didn’t like about how Sprint 1 went. At no point was there any finger pointing and the blame game just didn’t happen. The maturity of my team mates and our “chickens” impressed me to no end.

So, that is about it for my impressions on Sprint 1. We’re neck deep in planning Sprint 2 right now so I am afraid that Episode 4 of Roger’s Wars will still be a couple of days away. I’ve had a few people contact me asking when the rest of the saga was going to unfold but with the holidays and now our sprint planning, I’m having trouble finding the time to do it when my head is not either a) jell-o or b) utterly focused on work. Tomorrow or the next day I hope to sit myself down with a pot of Earl Grey and hammer out the fourth installment. Thanks for your patience

This morning, however, was nearly intolerable for the whole team. Here we are struggling to get our application tested thoroughly and polished up for the end of sprint when Facebook starts pulling all kinds of crazy shit on us. Random logouts. Messages about account maintenance. Warnings about trying to set FBML for inactive accounts. We ended up with a decent number of new bugs filed that weren’t bugs at all. It was just Facebook having a seizure! Of course, once we figured out that there were some issues on the Facebook side of things we relaxed a bit. Still, it made for a rather exhausting day!

Owing to this exhaustion, Episode 3 of Roger’s Wars will not be hitting the ether this evening. It’ll be here soon enough, though!
]]> http://www.ifisgeek.com/2008/12/23/facebook-delivers-a-painful-end-to-the-mfs-sprint-1/feed/ 0 http://www.ifisgeek.com/2008/12/21/site-changes/ http://www.ifisgeek.com/2008/12/21/site-changes/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:25:29 +0000 Jeffery Read http://www.ifisgeek.com/?p=115 Just a quick post to mention the fact that I have finally upgraded my WordPress! It’s been a long time coming and I have to say, I am impressed with how easy it was. Unfortunately, the copy I am using for this site was not installed with the DreamHost one-click-installs, so I could not do an automatic upgrade. Nonetheless, it was simple and easy. My old theme didn’t make it through the transition, however, which is the reason for the new look. I am not a big fan of this theme, but it will do until I get around to making a new one.

One thing that is cool about the new version of WordPress is that I now have tags on the site and on my posts. Tags. Categories. I did some reading a while back about which is better to use and the general consensus seems to be both. So I’ll have both. Yay!

For me, this is yet another reason to love DreamHost. In the past I have had the misfortune to deal, on behalf of clients, with a really awful web hosting company located right here in Saskatoon. When I started dealing with DreamHost I thought that all my wishes had been granted. I will be the first to tell you that DreamHost is not perfect. Far from it, in fact. If you believe that your webhost is perfect, then I am afraid that you should seek some medical help, because you are suffering from delusions. No webhost is perfect. They are run by regular human beings like you and me. As a result, they make mistakes like we do. The amazing thing about DreamHost is that they actually admit when they screw up. In my experience, this is a first amongst webhosts. I simply cannot count the number of times that I have had someone at a webhosting company tell me that something wasn’t their fault when it most defintely was. A perfect example is the aforementioned local hosting company. One of my clients had a dedicated server with them and it mysteriously went down one day. It took us four hours and talking to the two owners of the company before they owned up to the fact that someone accidentally unplugged the server in the data center.

In addition to being completely up-front about their operation, warts and all, the customer service at DreamHost is second to none. Back around the dawn of the new year I was working to migrate one client’s web application to new hosting at DreamHost. Unfortunately, the site relies on a very old version of Postresql which does not play well with networked storage and the storage at DreamHost is all networked. Over the course of two weeks their customer service staff spent a tonne of time trying to help me get things up and running. They even called me once, despite their site information stating that they only call US customers. Even though we could not get the legacy app to run properly on their machines, I was unbelievably impressed with their service and would recommend them to anyone on the basis of that alone.

While I’m on the topic of DreamHost, I noticed that Philip has had some trouble with his blog host recently. From the sounds of things, this is not the first time. Well, Philip, I suggest that you give DreamHost a try. In addition to all of the great things I had to say about them above, they also offer WordPress blogs as a one-click install. That’s it, just click one button in the administration panel and you’re golden. If you do switch, you’d be getting your blog onto a decent Linux web server instead of one of those nasty Windows machines

Just another quick note. Our house has both the bottom and top floors framed now and they should be adding the roof this week. On Saturday Lindsay and I took a trip over to the new place and took some pictures in and around the house. I will be posting them to the albums in the next few days, so keep an eye peeled.

Fun tip of the day: Apparently, if you mention Cover-All Building Systems in your blog the girls in Marketing will find out about it. Hi Robin! Hi Kathy! Try it for yourself and give a shout out to Cover-All!

Well, dear Englishman, never, ever challenge a Canadian to post to his blog more regularly. Perhaps this comment was not intended as a challenge, but I choose to take it as such. I shall therefore endeavour to post to this blog much more frequently. More frequently than some people across the pond post to theirs :p.

First, foremost and definitely tops of the life-altering list: Lindsay and I are expecting our first baby in August! We found out in early December of last year and have been trying to control who we tell. We didn’t want to tell too many people too quickly but we very quickly failed. Our original thought was to tell our parents at Christmas but, instead, we told them within two days of finding out. This is alternating between very exciting and very scary. It is becoming quite a bit more real now that Lindsay is starting to show. She has a little baby belly! We are going for an Ultrasound appointment on March 5th and we will hopefully learn if we are having a little boy or a little girl. Sorry, we won’t be telling anyone until the baby actually arrives!

Precipitated by the impending arrival, we started to take a look around our house to determine all that we need to have done before the fateful day arrives. The list was decently long. One of the reasons we liked the house we bought was that there was a lot we could do to it, but nothing we needed to do. With a baby on the way, the list of needed changes started to grow. Then we hit on a better idea: why upgrade the existing house when we could just get a brand new one? It turns out that this is a great time for such things – the housing market in Saskatoon is really starting to take off. It is really reaching the point where if we don’t take the chance to upgrade now, we might not get another for a long time. We have a place picked out and even have a deposit placed on it. It is all a matter of getting the financing squared away – a prospect which seems quite nice as it appears that we’ll have a couple of banks competing for our business. I’ll post more on the house, with some pictures later, after we get all the numbers sorted out.

Finally, things at work have really been heating up. I posted already about my trip to New Orleans (and I will probably post again). The reason for this trip was that the company I work for Cover-All Building Systems is in the process of implementing a whole new software infrastructure consisting of Intuitive ERP and DriveWorks. Basically, the iERP side of things is just replacing the in-house ERP system we have with something slicker, smoother and more functional. There will be a significant amount of improvement to the way things are done in the company, particularly on the manufacturing side of things. I find the DriveWorks side of the implementation to be a great deal more exciting!

Of course, in the interests of full-disclosure, I am excited about the project because I am in charge of the DriveWorks side of things. Aside from that, it is really very exciting for our company. It represents a major shift in how we operate. We have an amazing group of people working on getting our orders processed, planned, manufactured and shipped. So amazing, in fact, that we can often have a building on-site in before our competitors could even start manufacturing. One problem has always been our ordering process. Orders have always been entered through a web form and the information being entered was almost always incomplete. Between the time it would take our Order Management department to get full details of orders and the time it would take to get drawings and other outputs for the buildings it would often take twice as long to process the order as it should have taken to get the building on-site. Once the DriveWorks implementation is complete, much of this pain will go away and we’ll be able to have our buildings to the customer before a competitor could finish taking their order!

Finally, a bit of a plan for what I intend for this blog ongoing. I am definitely going to try to post more regularly. With updates on the baby and the house, I should not have any trouble finding topics. I also plan on getting some more pictures uploaded. Finally, I am going to start posting more tutorials. I use Visual Studio and the .NET Framework a great deal at work and there is a lot that I could be sharing on that front, so I will try not to be such a Linux snob! One of the first things I might add is a .NET library which acts as a wrapper around the database functionality built in. Personally, I like the way things work in the _pg module of python. Give me a db object and let me use db.query() to grab what I want. It will also contain some helper classes for authenticating against and Active Directory, streaming a binary file directly into the database and for outputting a Crystal Report as a pdf which is then streamed right into the database. Fun stuff!

That’s all for now…busy weekend ahead!