Wondering what it would take?
What would it take to get GPS Navigation apps to say “Make a right at the next light” instead of “Make a right in .1 miles”?
Another random thought brought to you by the letter L for Lost.
software
I enjoy a nice "Under Maintenance" page
Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference. I was in the middle of adjusting my monthly budgets on my favorite financial management site, mint.com, when all of the sudden the site went into “maintenance mode”. All the changes I made to my budgets were probably not saved and I have to go back and do it all again. This would annoy most customers but for some reason (I’m attributing my lack of annoyance to the pretty maintenance page) I’m ok with it.
Since I work in software, I understand that peak hour maintenance modes are sometimes a necessary evil – although we do everything possible to avoid. It’s refreshing when a company goes that tiny little bit further and pretties up their maintenance page.
I took a screen shot just because.
Cloudy with a Chance of Overkill
Do I really need this many “clouds”? I now have 3 “cloud drives” running on my mac (Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Dropbox). Not to mention I back up my important stuff with Norton Online Backup, my notes are available anywhere with Evernote, and my photos are on Flickr & Facebook.
I will be taking an introspective look at the strengths & weaknesses of all these and [hopefully] optimizing my life in the clouds.
Do I really need all these?
How should I consolidate?
Who will win this battle?
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!
What Worked (surprisingly) Well – Sprint Tracker in Source Control 1
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. (more…)