"Houston here. We're looking for somebody to blame for your problem, 13."

Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
It doesn't really matter whether the bug is your fault or someone else's—it is still your problem, and it still needs to be fixed.

--The Pragmatic Programmer

I highly doubt that was the response to Jim Lovell after the line, "Houston, we have a problem." However, in our world of software development it still seems to be the first reaction to any issue that comes up.

I know in projects past, I've been a huge offender of looking for, "It's not MY fault," rather than fixing the problem at hand. Todd even nicknamed me Blameosaurus on one project because I got so good at looking for the blame. So, I'm not exempt from my own post here.

I've been a consultant for one company or another for over ten years now, and we're constantly thrown into burning buildings to get something working. There are a plethora of issues on day 1, and all too often those of us on the team spend too much time bitching about the issues and not enough time rolling up our sleeves to get things squared away. So, day 2 rolls around and we're in the same boat, and the same problem still exists.

That said, sometimes there is a right time to track somebody down that created a problem. Don't do it as a way to shame them, but rather for more clarification. Who knows what the situation as like at the time they made the error, and maybe it's a good time to help somebody learn something new.

I feel I'm still an offender of whipping out the blame thrower a bit too often, but I'm making a conscious effort to quit and move on with the solution.

Some April Kanban Talks

I'm happy to have been selected to two conferences in the region to share an hour or so of Kanban, and my experiences with it.

The first will be at Central Ohio Day of .Net on April 18th in Wilmington. This is a great little conference that combines the forces of the dev communities of Dayton, Cincy, and Columbus for a day of geeking out. In addition to the great sessions they have lined up, there will also be Open Spaces. If you've got time on a Saturday in the spring, this is a great gathering at a great price...free!

The following Saturday, April 25th, I'm going to trek north and present at the Kalamazoo X conference. This is the first year for this conference, and it looks really interesting. It's focus is on the non-tech side of development, so there will be lots of dev process, design, and user interaction type talks. All the stuff we need to know without opening up our favorite IDE. As an added bonus, this place is in Kalamazoo for a required stop.

That will keep a couple Saturday afternoons busy in April for me. Now, if a certain local hockey team can keep the Saturday evenings busy...

COALMG Kanban Talk Follow-up

I would like to thank everybody that attended my Kanban talk at COALMG on March 5th. There were some great questions, a good discussion, and judging by the tweets on Twitter afterward, it got some wheels turning. I'm glad the talk got some of you thinking about things you can look into.

As promised to Jeff, here are my slides: A Little Lean With Kanban.

The disclaimer on the slides: They meant to support the presentation (I have totally bought into the Presentation Zen approach to presenting), so on their own they don't say much. However, my notes to each slide are there, and that should provide some value. Also, even though I used pptPlex for the presentation, if you don't have that they'll still work fine in Power Point.

Also, I love feedback. That was the first time I gave that presentation in that form, and welcome any suggestions you may have. I already got a few from Comrade, James, and Amanda over post-talk beers that will be folded in to the next iteration.

And all you guys named Jeff that bailed on the post-talk beers...for shame!

A Weekend With pptPlex

Some time last fall I believe, Jeff introduced me to pptPlex from Microsoft Office Labs. It does some pretty neat tricks with your slide deck. To me it appeared to be Deep Zoom for Power Point. (And let's be honest, anything to spice up Power Point is a good thing.)

So, I've got a new presentation to put together, and thought now would be a good time to give pptPlex a try. I wasn't disappointed, it does make moving through your presentation more fun. To get it to work there are a couple special slide types it uses, and a different way to launch the deck, and that's about it.

The first special slide is the section divider slide. It has a title and some grayed out text on it. You drag it into the deck at the point you want a section to start, add the title, and done. That section will exist until pptPlex finds another section divider slide. This groups your slides by however you'd like, and applies the title from the section divider slide to that group.

The second special slide type is a canvas slide. This slide ends up being the canvas for the whole presentation. There are a few pre-made ones you can use, and also two custom options. Basically, the layout you choose determines how your slide groups are arranged on the canvas. I ended up using the advanced custom option, which wasn't too hard to lay out. Lots of typical dragging and dropping to get the layout like you want it. Took maybe 10 minutes to get my six sections all set up like I want.

Both the section and canvas slides appear on the new pptPlex portion of the ribbon. Also on that menu are the new options for launch that will start your presentation up in pptPlex mode rather than in traditional Power Point mode. The first of "From Overview" is the one that will start your presentation from the canvas, and is the one I think most people are going to use.

Now for the downsides I ran into...

First issue I came up with was that it didn't work with my presenter mouse. I've got the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, and no dice with it doing anything in presenter mode. A little searching on the web turns up that pptPlex doesn't yet support that mouse. HOWEVER! It will support use with a Wii remote and an xbox controller. +1 to each for cool factor, but I'm trying to be practical here and still give a presentation.

My solution to this ended up being mapping the two side buttons on my mouse to the left and right keys on the keyboard. It's not the ideal solution, but it will cover 90% of what I'll need to handle during a presentation. There will be a couple of gotchas with this, but it should get the job done.

The second issue I came across was that once you've published your slides to the pptPlex output, you lose all your animations. I don't use animations a lot, but a couple places they would have come in very handy for effect. However, the pptPlex FAQ lays out that they just didn't have time to get that in for this release. (Yo, MS, add one more guy to the team and task him with mouse integration and animation!)

Overall, I'm digging the product. I think it'll help with a lot of my presentations, and I'll probably refactor any of my old ones to use it. The cool factor it brings makes the above two hurdles tolerable.

Besides, a sensor bar and a bluetooth card form my laptop will have me running a Wii controller in no time!

Goals for 2009

I got tagged by Jeffery back in January for this, and since there's nothing I should do today that I can't put off until tomorrow...

Professional Goals

1. Speak 12 to 15 times: I spoke 12 times last year, covered three different states, and had a heck of a time. Why no big increase here? Because realistically speaking (pardon the pun), that was plenty with everything else that goes on with job and family.

2. Present "Care About Your Craft" at least 5 times: I gave this one a couple times last year, and would like to give it more. It's a great talk that covers a lot of things developers can do outside of their syntax of choice to be better developers.
3. Upgrade the MVC talk and samples: When I wrote my goals out at the beginning of the year, I put this one on here because I'm a little behind on my MVC. But this week, I started in on a project that was going to leverage it, and found out just how far behind I am. So, I'm already underway on achieving this goal.

4. Create a new presentation: This one will be taken care of thanks to being invited to speak on Kanban at COALMG in March. (I've procrastinated this post long enough that one goal is reached! w00t!)

5. Write a sample app in Ruby: I need to work on my Ruby some more.

6. Contribute to an open source project: I need to do this, as well. Need to find the right one to contribute to, though. Maybe combine this with goal #5.
7. Get the blog better organized: Had this one on the list for a while, but I keep putting it off. Should I install Grafitti? Should I just run with Blogger? I need a new design no matter what engine I use. Thankfully, I've got a few friends who are willing to help out on all points, should be fun.
8. Write 35 blog posts: 3 posts a month should be doable. Though it's already February and I'm behind my pace.
9. Read 12 books: A book a month...like above, I'm aleady behind. On my list, though, are to re-read the Pragmatic Programmer, finish Implementing Lean Software, and to get through Uncle Bob Martin's Clean Code.

Personal Goals

1. Fix my office to be more usable: Wendy and I don't have the best layout to our home office, and we both need a little space of our own in there.
2. Get better lighting in our basement: We have two choices for lights during movie watching - harsh flourescent lighting, or none at all.

3. Budget our vacations better: We've got two trips planned already, and we tend to say, "Screw it! We're on vacation!" when we go to buy something while we're out seeing the world. (Usually Disney World.)
4. Clean up our finances: I'm waiting for a year when this ISN'T on my list of goals.
5. Lose weight: Like #4, I could use a year without this one on the list. Thankfully I'm starting '09 lighter than I was in '08, but could still drop a few more pounds.

Speaking at COALMG

I have been selected to present on Kanban to the Central Ohio ALM Group on March 5th. This will kick off my 2009 speaking tour, and I get to open it with a new talk on Kanban. I'm really looking forward to this talk because I've seen the advantages of Kanban first hand.

So, if you want to learn a little about Kanban, what it is, and how to get started with it...or if you just want to heckle me...drop by the Microsoft offices on Polaris Pkwy March 5th.

Codemash 2009 thoughts

Another Codemash has come and gone, which means there are more than a few recap posts out there, so I'll add mine to the pile.

The biggest take away for me this year was the sheer number of people I got to talk to, shake hands with, and bend an elbow with. In past years, that group has been basically limited to the other Quick folks that were up there or a small circle of people outside of Quick that I knew. This year, though, that number was much larger. I can easily attribute this to two things.

First, I got out and about in the community more in '08 than in past years, including a few speaking gigs around the region. I got to hang out for extended times with new colleagues from Cincy to Grand Rapids and a lot of places in between. That made for a lot of familiar faces while strolling around Kalahari.

Second, and this is probably the larger of the two: Twitter. I started in on Twitter last year after Codemash and before I headed to Mix, and it showed at this year's edition of Codemash. The number of people I could talk with in person because we'd had a few conversations on Twitter made starting those conversations much easier.

For the content itself, I was really impressed with the Pre-Compiler. This was the first year for the extra day, and I wish they'd have spread that material over the whole conference. I found myself wanting to be in three places at once on Wednesday. I ended up with a morning of Ruby with Joe and Jim, and an afternoon of Lean and Kanban with Dave Laribee.

For the full conference, I was all over the place. Some open spaces, some sessions, some hallway conversation, some recovery time that we don't need to discuss here, etc, etc. I took in Venkat's second session (skipped the Scala one), made sure I saw Mary Poppendieck, saw Laribee's DDD talk, and a few others.

Open Spaces I was really looking forward to on the heels of all the news from DevLink and what Alan Stevens did down there. I got to two, one on pair programming and one on branding yourself. I submitted one, but thanks to the snow and the room changing a couple times my turnout was five other people from Quick. We decided we could cover this at another meeting and headed back out into the sessions. So, overall I was a bit let down with the Open Spaces, but I think good content in the sessions combined with good content in the Open Spaces makes for some tough choices. Alan runs a slick Open Space, though. The ceremony is kind of cool. [Insert essence v. ceremony joke here]

My mini-speaking part in the show was when Jon Kruger, Steve Harman, and myself gave some first hand experiences with Kanban in the QSI vendor session. We ended up with a decent turnout and went 10 minutes over our allotted time taking more questions. I thought it turned out really well.

So, another Codemash behind me, and another kick in the butt to start the new year. Top of the list, clean up the blog. In the branding open space I learned that using the default theme from .txt turns people off...thank goodness I use the default blogger theme, instead. I'm going to get Graffiti installed and get a better look for it.