Make Me A Baseball Card is Live!
I've always been a coding tinker-er but most of my personal projects never really "went live". This year I made a new years resolution to design, develop and deploy an app all the way through.
I'm proud to announce that I flipped the switch and my first personal project went live last night! You can check it out here: MakeMeABaseballcard.com There were lots of late nights and lots of coffee. It was like having a 2nd part-time job. Whew...
What is it?
MakeMeABaseballcard.com lets someone track their baseball stats and print out their very own baseball card.
When they click the Print Card link, we open a new window and they can print their card directly through the browser's print functionality. Here's my printed card.
What's next?
There are a TON of things I want to add. Keep an eye on the facebook page for new features!
My First Beer Label
And my realization that I SUCK at photoshop....
I decided to call my latest batch of homebrew Rosie IPA (in honor of the Puppy's first christmas) and I had an idea for a label in mind. After stumbling and bumbling through the wealth of photoshop tutorials I realized that I SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP. Actually, let me clarify, I suck and graphic designing in Photoshop. I can rock Bridge + Camera Raw for photo editing, but when it comes to graphics and text and layouts and layers I SUCK. It took me an hour to figure out how to draw a rectangle that fit across the top third of the canvas!!
Anyway, I stumbled through it and I'm actually pretty happy with the result:
The crazy thing is that I think I can do all of this even easier in the simplified editor that comes with Snagit!
What Worked (surprisingly) Well – Sprint Tracker in Source Control
This past sprint retrospective the team proposed that we change up the way our scrum team reports on task progress. The team proposed that we keep our Sprint Tracker excel document in source control. Then prior to the daily standup meeting each team member would check out the document, update the time remaining on their tasks, and check it back in.
I am surprised at how well this worked! I was expecting that nobody would participate or somebody would forget to checkin and then go on vacation or any number of possibilities. But I'm proud to report our standups are more effective and efficient because we spend more time to discussing what was done, what to do and what things are standing in the way.
Let me try and explain in more detail.
Job hunting and trying something new
Fueled by insomnia and inspired by late night tv, I've decided to try something new on my job hunting technique. Recently found a number of perfect fit job postings on boards like Indeed.com or Dice.com. I would submit my resume and write a formal cover letter and never hear anything. Weeks go by and crickets. So it's time to switch it up a bit.
Since project manager job hunting is all about selling yourself. I decided against the typical formal resume & cover letter in favor of a proven, tried-and-true selling technique: "The Infomercial".
My Favorite Safari Extension – Ultimate Status Bar
I love Safari as my default browser. But there was one little tiny thing that drove me nuts: you don't see the URL when you hover over a hyperlink. I often found myself right-click > copy link > paste in text editor. Annoying.
I finally decided to see if anyone else shared my annoyance and if anyone else did something about it. I came across the Ultimate Status Bar extension and immediately tried it out. Simple, Perfect and Exactly what I was looking for. I love it when I get small wins like this!
Rating: 
Heres a screen shot from the Ultimate Status Bar download page:
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