Shut up and drink your coffee

Happy St. Patrick's Day

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:14:00 +0000

The Indy Canal dyed green. Pretty cool.

Let's keep it to a low roar today before firing up the engines for March Madness tomorrow.

Rippin and Runnin

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:16:00 +0000

The results from the Progeny Paintball war were as expected. Undefeated on the afternoon. We lined up against a group of guys bringing their own gear and wore em out. They simply were not ready for the intensity that we were bringing to the game. We outflanked, outmaneuvered, out-thought, outhustled, and out busted a cap in their hind parts.

One interesting angle was the group of young kids that were divided up between the two teams. We’re pretty sure that Andy Blum was using 11 year old kids as human shields.

Below are some photos from the post war Icelandic-viking-like celebration victory party at the RAM brewery…featuring frothy beverages and a tour of the brewery.

We stopped at India to refuel the tanks.

And the victory celebration continued.

Thank you to everybody for coming down and making this a great event.

…and if anybody says they are not sore they are lying.

Progeny Battle

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Here is the schedule for Saturday. We're goin in rippin and runnin packing heat.

11:00 Battle Preparation - (featuring cocktails) at my house
No explanation necessary.

12:30 Dark Armies - gear up and instructions http://darkarmies.com/
If anybody is late we get fined or something. Seriously. If you miss the insurance talk you can't play.

1:00 Battle begins
You are strongly encouraged to wear a protective cup over your marbles.

All entry fees are covered by Progeny. Paint is $12 for 100 shots.

3:00 Battle ends
Bring something to change into so that we can head downtown. It's a brewery. You don't have to be pretty.

4:00 Post War tour and beer tasting at the RAM downtown http://www.theram.com/
Tour lasts for about an hour. I'm guessing it will be over at 5:30.

Beer tour costs are covered.

And then it gets a little fuzzy.

There are rumors that there is a chicken limo at 7pm but they are not confirmed.

7:00 The Chicken Limo picks us up at the RAM and drops us where we say. http://www.chickenlimo.com (turn down your speakers before you click that)

Rip and Run.

Hoo-ra.

More Feedback

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:25:00 +0000

This time from across the pond...from two separate institutions...

There is a lot of hard work behind this. Congrats to everybody.

“Progeny has changed our lives”, “Progeny has improved the way we work”, “Progeny has saved us weeks and months of time”, “The web version is fabulous, it’s exceeded our expectations”, “I recommend Progeny to everyone”

“Since going multi-user we’ve seen the value of Progeny to us snowball”, “Progeny is so full of features, we’re barely scratching the surface”, “We’re really pleased with how you handle problems and get us a solution”

9=8

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:14:00 +0000

Even at the highest levels...themes are used to bring teams together.

In an attempt to get his team all pulling from the same side of the rope Manager Joe Maddon gave a speech in training camp that explained his 9=8 theme for the year.

9=8 essentially translates to nine players playing hard for nine innings every day equals one of eight post-season berths. It also explained that in order to make the playoffs they needed

nine more wins because of hitting
nine more wins because of pitching
nine more wins because of defense

Some players rolled their eyes. Others stared straight ahead with blank looks on their faces.

"I'm so used to the eye roll. I'm so used to the scoff," Maddon said, looking back on that first day of camp. "I'm so used to it, and I'm really immune to both … At some point, corny can turn into cool."

The Rays finished last in the AL East in nine of their first 10 seasons. They won 66 games last year and finished with the worst record in baseball.

They clinched a post-season berth for the first time with their 93rd victory — exactly 27 more than a year ago.

"Our program's been validated. Our concepts have been validated," Maddon said Tuesday. "It's not anything complicated. It's the basic stuff. Running hard, good turns. Playing catch. Fastball command. First to third. Those kinds of things. Everybody thinks we're so fancy, but we're so basic."

They emblazoned the 9=8 on T-shirts and posted it in the clubhouse and weight room.

"The whole point was to just have it out there on a daily basis, so when someone's walking behind somebody, they can see it," Maddon said

"We have little signs on the wall, again, reminding. I know a lot of times they will walk by and not focus on it, but sometimes, just for a moment, they will. And the impact of that moment is worth it. That's the way I see it."

Along the way the concept caught on.

"We are a team, that's the biggest thing out of this," Trever Miller said. "We are a cohesive unit and the epitome of what a team is, on and off the field. Guys love it when the other guy does well. There's none of that, 'Oh, I hope he fails so I can succeed.' And that goes a long way through the course of the season. Everybody has accepted their role, whatever that may be."

And the culture heated up.

players say Maddon's insistence that things are done "The Ray Way" is responsible, too.

Although he's an intellectual type who prefers fine wine to a cold beer following a game, Maddon can be one of the boys.

When Upton decided on a whim to get a Mohawk haircut last month, the fad caught on in the clubhouse. Maddon joined in the fun, getting his hair cut and noting the importance of solidarity.

"That stuff all matters," he said.

And when they all understood what they were trying to do and they came together as a team they found success beyond what they thought was possible.

The Cocoon of Concentration

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:56:00 +0000

I ran into an interesting article about Tiger Woods and his focus.

"Rocco Mediate’s head swiveled about as he walked up the fairway of the sudden-death hole of the U.S. Open on Monday. Somebody would catch his attention, and his eyes would dart over and he’d wave or make a crack. Tiger Woods’s gaze, on the other hand, remained fixed on the ground, a few feet ahead of his steps. He was, as always, locked in, focused and self-contained."

“I have never in my life seen a wider chasm between the look in someone’s eye and the surrounding environment.”

"But inevitably, it is his ability to enter the cocoon of concentration that is written about and admired most."

I have been thinking a lot about making use of time lately and it always brings me to focus.

It's so much easier to bang out quality stuff when your head is clear. You immerse and lose track of time. There's no question that the work is more enjoyable in the "flow state"..."An optimal psychological state of total involvement in the task at hand"

The legendary soccer player Pele described his experience of being in the zone: "I felt a strange calmness.. . a kind of euphoria. I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their team or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically.

Another example was given by Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, who during qualifying for the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix said he felt like he was driving the car beyond his limits. "I was already on pole, [...] and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more."

I don't think it's any different for building software...especially on a team that is doing remarkable work.

Progeny Lingo

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:44:00 +0000

We have built an interesting language over the years. This is a vocabulary that we use without thinking about it. Make comments on anything I have missed.

Gem,
Silo,
Artifact,
Project,
Scoop of Chocolate,
Gateway,
Walrus,
Rhino,
Spider,
Core Object,
Google Search,
Shell,
Photons,
Gotcha,
Scrum,
Sprint,
Anywhere,
Snowman,
Code Smell,
Wizard (evil wizard),
Communism/Utopia,
A+ design,
Nav,
Mini,
Smart(blank),
Deal fairy,
Desktop,
Enterprise,
Clinical,
Lab,
Soak,
755th impression,
PRO,
st_,
Magic Number,
Progenized,
Peg,
Rodeo,
Time Vampire,
Heat Meat and Sweet

Orcas

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:48:00 +0000

We are busy building the next generation of Orcas. We are looking at this project not only as a potential significant boost to the way we build software but also as a test of Rails and its ability to deliver on its many promises.

The functionality that we are committed to delivering is listed below. It's meant to be a binding public declaration that will handcuff us and make us wish that we never posted it.

This will be a highly iterative process where we get your feedback early and use it throughout the 2 weeks. There will be a release at least daily and will be based on the schedule below. The first release is tomorrow and new functionality will be deployed every day. We are counting on you to provide feedback.

Keep an open mind. The polish will not be on until late next week. Success in this project will be a major boost to this team.

PROJECTS/SPRINTS
Ability to extensively tag and search projects
Ability to track a log of the history on a project
Specs tied to a project and the ability to include attachments
All the data that is tracked on a project in Walrus has to be tracked. This includes test and test attachments.
Projects tab. (Replaces the Walrus spreadsheet)
Project tab defaults to current user but can use “*” or “JPC MP DMD” to filter the projects.
Sprint building that leaves out no current functionality.
Moving or automoving projects into the next sprint
The ablility to stage projects in some kind of “next sprint” area
The ability to rapidly add projects
SPRINT METRICS AND HISTORY
Calculate sprint metrics so they don’t have to be manually calculated
Provide history of sprint metrics (the ability to run metrics over previous sprints)
Metrics are velocity, allocated, incidents, hours, defects, rework%
Include burndowns
TODAY
Ability to track “Today” must and nice to have “Tasks”
Ability to create “Today” tasks associated with projects or to drag in the project.
Clear and easy to use flow for entering “current est”, “actual hours”, and “status” of my projects
Allow for edit of all and one click submit. (Or better yet it would work like Google spreadsheets)
Developers’ daily updates of project status should be done in the “Today” tab
Display “Today”s turtle scales
Avitars
WIKI
Build new pages
Edit existing pages
TESTING VIEW
Provide the spreadsheet that Conrad works from to build scripts
BALLS
The ER board that shows the drama at a glance (id, description, customer, date due, last contact)
Track the log of all contacts
Ability to extensively tag and search balls
Log style tracking on balls
REQUESTS
Backlog management (the customer request list)
DEFECTS
Ability to view defect and bugs and display a metric that shows the state of the software
DASHBOARD
the most recent events
usage stats off the login screen
current defect state
defect metric
CONTEXT CAPTURE / WEEKLY REVIEW
Easy to generate “current week” review and “current month” review
Context capture and the ability to generate summaries/reviews over a specified period of time
Track both general ideas and context tied to a project
EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS
Ability to “subscribe” to a project or ball and get emails when it changes
MOMENTUM VIEW
Ability to view the momentum of the team at a glance
ROCKS
View of your top 5 priorities for the quarter
View of all everyone’s top 5 priorities for the quarter
The “ladder” up though the strategic plan
DATA IMPORT
Test Walrus import early in order to test with meaningful data
Import Walrus data to cut over

Craft is about details

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:51:00 +0000

I was watching a show on the discovery channel about Japanese sword making and it reminded me that "craft is about details".

I took a look at my commitment to doing the little things right and building things that are well designed and feel right.

The article is thought provoking and is worth another read.

Greatness

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:03:00 +0000

There have been a lot of interesting conversations following last sprint's arrow head drawing coup.

One thing that was talked about in a conversation at lunch last Monday was the idea that Jon was 3 days into the arrow drawing and did not want to give up on what he had.

In the end that was what he had to do to get to a much higher quality end result.

The philosophical discussion centered around the idea that our structure does not allow for failure. It does not reward you for returning from dead ends and trying other approaches. You tend to be dead set on getting the points for the hours you already invested in the project.

To the rescue comes an idea that we kicked around at the developer conference. In December we decided that we need more R&D projects. We also discussed that R&D projects allow for creativity in our system that is centered around getting things done and "Inches".

Don't be afraid to request an R&D project to shoot for a design or architecture homerun in a project (or for refactoring). We will create another Walrus project for the R&D.

ChaCha ... cha

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0000

I'm having dinner with a VP of ChaCha tonight and I wanted to try out the human powered search engine.

I was not sure what to ask but Brian suggested "What is the leading genetic data management system"

I text messaged my question while we were enjoying our Qdoba.

In about two minutes I received a return text with the following.

Progeny Software is the leading genetic data management software in the world. They were established in 1996.

Naturally.

They were also able to tell me how many calories were in my burrito.

Pretty cool.

First Sprint for 08

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:32:00 +0000

An interesting sprint. Exactly 40 points were originally allocated each for the starting 160 points. This is the number that we wanted. It leaves 20 points (33%) for incidents.

57 total incidents were added. We planned for that to be 80.

For the two weeks:

Team Velocity = 144
Average Points = 36
Average Hours = 54

Comments:

We want to use this as a means to get better at what we do. If you don't like the idea of stats compare it to a video game. It would not be very interesting if there was no score or time...if you didn't get any feedback. We're doing the best we can do to generate meaningful feedback.
This is a structure that we are putting in place to help us stay on beat as we grow. It will also be valuable in times where we are under the gun and have to plan and produce results.
In this sprint I think people feel like a lot was done compared to the points that were put up. That brings up an interesting question about a point. We equate points with the effort required to complete the project (this is standard scrum). Maybe there should be a factor involved for how valuable the completed project is to the software.
There also needs to be an element of quality and we are working on that now. The defects will allow us to monitor the quality of the projects produced in the sprint over time. The sprint is not complete until there has been enough time to weigh the defects that have come in over a number of months. More importantly we will use the defects to highlight what mistakes we are making and cut down on how often we make them.
We talked about measuring unplanned incidents to determine a "company loss of focus " factor. In this sprint nobody exceeded the 20 planned incidents.

This system is not perfect but we have a good start and the plan is to continue to tweak it over time.

Eventually we will present it at SD West as a cutting edge methodology...and we will have solid results and a couple of years of data to back it up.

Was that a question?

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:46:00 +0000

I've always wondered why people answer questions that are not questions.

Check out what this Zuckerberg character does. It's at the 3:45 mark of this video.

Well done my man. A great no response to a no win question.

Merry Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:27:00 +0000

Scrooge was better than his word. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew….and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that truly be said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!

Responsive

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:17:00 +0000

This is for some work we (when I say we I mean Doug) did yesterday for one of our best customers.

Test run came out good!

Thanks, great and light-speeding work!

With a royal flavor…

I consider it as a personal Christmas present! (and I have something to do on Christmas…)

By the way, marry Christmas and happy New Year! (It also includes a wish I will not disturb you any more this year)

Thanks again, and very best wishes

Hard Work

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:33:00 +0000

When Andy flew in on Tuesday night he was under the weather.

I picked him up at the airport at 6 and we worked on the presentation until midnight.
It took about 3 hours to get their entire workflow and inventory system in and the rest of the time to tune the slides and the presentation.

We literally only stopped to grab some soup because Andy thought it would make him feel better. By midnight I was exhausted.

It was a great presentation. It had a great flow that was thought out. It was obvious to them that we created this presentation specifically for them and it had an impact.

When they said they wanted to do business with Progeny and develop a future relationship it was like a shot of adrenaline but it was magnified because we had worked so hard.

There is something about hard work that you cannot beat. It is like a law of the universe. I like this quote.

"When a committed person tackles a roadblock, the roadblock stands very little chance. After a little time spent hacking away at the roadblock, the universe will tend to do the equivalent of saying, “Well, alright then… I was just checking to see if you were serious. I won’t stand in your way anymore. You’re free to proceed.”

I was reading a little fiction book that covers the philosophy of a billionaire who believed that he took the joy of hard work away from his extended family by giving them everything they needed.

The book starts at the reading of his will where he appears on video and apologizes to them for taking a great joy from them. They could never experience the thing that brought him so much satisfaction...exhausting hard work and the reward that follows it.

If we close this deal everyone should feel good about it because we were up against 6 other vendors who in the words of the prospect..."do not get it". Apparently we "get it" but it is a product of a lot of hard work from everyone.

I'm hoping that you can share in some of that adrenaline from Wednesday and you are experiencing success as Herschel Walker defined it..."success is working so hard that you fall asleep the second your head hits the pillow".

2007 Developer Awards

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:58:00 +0000

These are the topics that you nominated.

Developer Conference

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:37:00 +0000

The year end developer conference is December 6th and 7th in Indianapolis.

We have never done this before and I am looking forward to it.

The plan is to review the year, figure out what we got done, brainstorm on how to work better, eat at Indy's finest steakhouse, race some carts, and figure out what we want to do next year. We want to get everybody pulling from the same side of the rope and gear up for a big year.

South Bend guys will leave Thursday morning at 8 and leave Indy Friday afternoon at 3. You will be staying at the Conrad which is in walking distance to the office and St. Elmo.

More details to come.

I'm not making this up

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:24:00 +0000

Recent feedback from the front lines. These are from users working with the software daily.

Think about the fact that we are in over 60 countries with no dedicated support staff and we get a steady stream of this kind of feedback. This should be encouraging as we push through the load of work and challenges that we are now facing.

Doing a job well is much more engaging than doing a job.

Midwest:

As I usually send you requests regarding problems, I thought I would mix it up a bit. I love the changes to the import module! It is much easier to use.

Thanks!

West Coast:
The painful learning curve has paid off (mostly). I got another chunk of data today and was able to (mostly) already do the prelimiary analysis! I did add a second sample to the existing individuals and it was fine.

I am so thrilled that I just sent out an email with a big summary file of these results- when things work with progeny, they are GREAT.

anyhow,
thanks!

East Coast:

Great! After changing the names of CHP files, now I can also import the genotypes into Progeny.
Sorry for so many questions as I am a new user. Fortunately, I think I almost work well with Progeny. Thank you very much.

If you want to know the accounts let me know. I don't like to publish the names.

Big Fish

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 00:30:00 +0000

They say that a good fisherman never has two bad days in a row.

Great job on the work done yesterday and today on the recovery. I looked over the installation and reviewed all the items for the beta and it looks very clean.

The assist goes to QA on getting everything reviewed. It was a huge week for QA in general.

Breathing Fire

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:22:00 +0000

In Dreaming in Code there was a theory that to build great software there has to be somebody who is breathing fire into it...in a ferocious way.

What would happen if everybody was breathing fire into it?

Inbox Zero talk

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:48:00 +0000

Dreaming in Code

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:37:00 +0000

>
Similarly, there was nothing especially scary about bug number 44. It was a routine sort of problem that programmers had accepted responsibility for ever since computer software had migrated from a text-only, one-line-at-a-time universe to today's graphic windows-and-mouse landscape. What scared Toy was not so much the nature of Bug 44 but the impossibility of knowing how long it would take to fix. Take one such unknown, place it next to all the other similar unknowns in Chandler, multiply them by one another, and you have the development manager's nightmare: a "black hole" in the schedule, a time chasm of indeterminate and perhaps unknowable dimensions.

Two months before, the entire Chandler team of a dozen programmers had met for a week of back-to-back meetings to try to solve a set of problems that they had dubbed "snakes"--another word Toy had salvaged from Netscape's ruins. A snake wasn't simply a difficult problem; it was an "important problem that we don't have consensus on how to attack." Snake superseded a looser usage at OSAF of the word dragon to describe the same phenomenon.
<

>
I believed that the most important software needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time. Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock.
<

>
A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.
With nine months of work under their belt and a product that remained more vision than code , the Chandler programmers still hadn't found their hustle.
<

>
The 1955 report argued that the problem with software wasn't just a matter of too many midstream course corrections and late design changes that would never be tolerated by the builders of bridges; it was also a problem of failing to learn from mistakes: "When a bridge falls down, it is investigated and a report is written on the cause of the failure. This is not so in the computer industry where failures are covered up , ignored, and/or rationalized. As a result we keep making the same mistakes over and over again."
<

>
Software is abstract and therefore seems as if it should be infinitely malleable. And yet, for all its ethereal flexibility, it can be stubbornly, maddeningly intractable, and is constantly surprising us with its rigidity.

That paradox kicks in at the earliest stages of a programming project, when a team is picking the angle of attack and choosing what languages and technologies to use. These decisions about the foundations of a piece of software, which might appear at first to be lightweight and reversible, turn out to have all the gravity and consequence of poured concrete.
<

>
Nobody should start to undertake a large project Torvalds snapped. You start with a small trivial project and you should never expect it to get large. If you do you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or, worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small and think about the details. Don' think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly overdesigned.
<

>
Most elements of software are incorporeal and invisible. There is nothing to point to. So talking about them is unexpectedly difficult. This is one reason why the whiteboard is such an iconic presence in any space where software is labored over; it provides a canvas for laying out the abstract processes of a complex program in ways that allow people to point to what they're talking about.
<

>
They still dreamed about building the bigger platform - the open-ended, world-changing tool that, with the right additions of code, could organize and connect all sorts of disparate data.
<

Java Bean Feedback

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:11:00 +0000

This is from a user that is embedding the Java Bean.

"By the way, whoever designed and created Anywhere is quite a creative genius. It is a fantastic accomplishment!"

The Creative Process

noreply@blogger.com (David DeRam) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:47:00 +0000

The creative process generally resists being put into words. As Louis Armstrong said, "Man if you have to ask 'What is it?' you ain't never goin' to know."