Silver Slippers: The Book is Better than the Movie
One of the many luxuries of being able to do a large portion of my jobs from home, is that I get to be an active participant in the daily lives of my family. Recently my wife has started the practice of reading real chapter books aloud to the kids at lunch and before bed. Over the course of the last several months, I’ve had the opportunity of listening to “The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe”, “Because of Winn-Dixie”, and “The Wizard of Oz” read aloud by my wife and experienced for the first time by my children. — Please don’t spoil the end of Winn-Dixie for me. I missed the ending because I had to work and I don’t know if everyone at the party finds him or not. — The current book we’re reading is Oz. There’s no telling how many times I’ve watched that movie. It was in constant rotation in my house growing up. I’d conservatively guess I’ve watched the movie 25 times. But, despite having seen the movie many times, I’ve never once read the book. To be honest, until I married my elementary school librarian wife, I didn’t even know Oz was a book. So, this read-aloud experience has been really cool for me. I’m getting to experience the book of The Wizard of Oz for the first time.
Read more...No Estimates: Project Management without Guessing
I have long been a skeptic of AgileTM. There is no doubt that team-based, flexible, and product/value-focused software development is the best way we’ve discovered so far to build great, useful software. That, I believe, is fairly established even in the most corporate of environments. What I remain skeptical of is “methodologies” and processes which claim to “govern” and “better manage” the agile software development team and process. In my career I’ve found most of these techniques to serve MBAs’ and project managers’ need to track and quantify rather than to serve the team or improve the craft or quality of software. On the contrary, many AgileTM methodologies I’ve experienced over the years have slowed the development process, hurt developer moral, and led to software that was behind schedule and didn’t provide the full value needed.
Read more...The Alliance: Honesty in the IT Community
Having recently left one employer for another, the topic of talent retention is fresh on my mind. When I started my new job at LifeWay the director over my department asked me to read The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and and Chris Yeh. At first glance The Alliance looked like the typical IT management book. At only about 150 pages with a largish font and a trendy cover, my expectations where not high. Luckily, however, I was surprised by what I found inside. It is not a weighty book. It doesn’t go super deep. It does waste a lot of paper and ink – especially the later chapters. But, even though the content of this book would make a better blog post than a full publication, The Alliance makes some important points and gives useful guidance for the contemporary IT leader.
Read more...The Boxcar Children
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Waner was a very good book. The main characters in the book are Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny. They have ran away from their grandfather.
The story starts off when the four children are at a bakery. The owner is inside the store watching them look through the window at the food. They enter and ask if they can stay for the night. She says yes. That night Henry hears her tell the cook that she is going to keep all of them except Benny. She is going to send Benny to the children’s home. Hearing that they run away and find a boxcar. They decide to live there. The next day Henry goes to work for a doctor who knows his grandfather. One day Violet gets sick and they take her to the doctor. They stay there while she recovers. While there their grandfather comes. They grow to like him and move in with him.
