Up to Something
Gem
“To manage a team foremost focus on how you conduct yourself for it’s how you align and influence everyone else”.
20 Pieces of Programming Wisdom
Sold on Smartphone usage
It’s been 3-5 weeks since I brought LG Optimus 2x. I have been using it for everything from reading my feeds, reading manga once in a while, mails. Any.do is one of the apps I use for managing office todo tasks. Completely sold on the fact that smartphone will take away PC usage time by certain factor for those who own both a PC and smartphone. Given the falling cost of the same vis a vi feature phones, I bet lot of people will have smartphones in coming days. This would translate increase in software services for
a) You website should be mobile ready,
b) Lot of software in form of mobile apps being developed,
c) Lot of hiring for mobile developers.
365 Photos of 2012 from my Smartphone camera Project
Underway here
Few of the good ones …
Rant
I thinks that non journalist bloggers who cover Indian startup space are immature and have no clue what they are saying … well most of them … You can find them talking shit most of the time with no idea about the financial details or complete product offerings of the companies. Most of them survive thanks to google ads payout and taking news syndication feeds. The tone and choice of words reflects in their lack of education (not formal) needed to cover business news. Their articles and it’s content clearly reflects the amount of study that has gone behind it.
Google update your search ranking and bump off these phonies.
Twitter Bootstrap
For developer like me who don’t have good CSS/HTML skills Twitter Bootstrap is god send.
Vinland Saga
Vinland Saga is a manga that doesn’t look like one. The plot, the settings, illustration style. It can disguise itself as a graphic novel from Europe.
To borrow from wikipedia
“Vinland Saga is set in England starting in 1013 AD, the year in which the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard conquered most of it. As King Sweyn nears death, his sons, Prince Harald and Prince Canute, are arguing over his succession. The story draws elements from historical accounts of the period such as TheFlateyjarbók, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eric the Red.”
Review
a) Illustrations are mindblowing,
b) Plot has thrill, action,
c) If anyone has read vagabond and like the protagonist then you would love this one for sure,
d) Has been written by the same guy who wrote Planetes,
e) Does manage to transport one to the era in which it’s been set, you can see motif’s from Christianity, symbols acurately depicting the flags of those time etc.
All in all a very engaging manga.
Scipy.in 2011
“This conference is targeted at anyone who uses Python for work in science/engineering/technology/education. This includes college and university teachers/professors/lecturers from any Engineering or Science domain, students of engineering/science/education who would like to use Python for their basic computing and plotting needs, researchers who use or would like to use Python for their research, and corporate users of Python for scientific computing.” For more head here SciPy
The Conference schedule is out and my talk on “Multiprocessing module and Gearman” has been selected.
My agenda is to start by driving home the point that multiple cores are everywhere and with passing years machines with 16 cores will be a common place. (I am talking about enterprise here. ). Size of data sets are increasing and web application of this decade have made consumer habituated to real-time results. Hence as a python developer it’s important for you to know
a) How do I use all the cores for computation ?
b) How do I write code that can use many machines/computers for computation ?
I will use multiprocessing based example to answer a) and then modify that code to scale over many computers using gearman to answer b). Will post the video, code samples, presentation here once done.
Hi-Fi to Sci-Py … now that’s just being me.
Planetes – Manga
A manga I would like to recommend.
Those who like sci-fi and astronomy would definitely like planetes. More so coz the author knows his science very well sp space science if there is anything like that. Mind you the story gets better from chapter 4 onwards. It really does offer a glimpse into the future. Those who enjoyed say “Songs from distant earth” – By A Clarke could get the same feel from this.
Haunted by a space flight accident that claimed the life of his beloved wife, Yuri finds himself six years later as part of a team of debris cleaners on a vessel called the Toy Box charged with clearing space junk from space flight paths. The team consists of Hachimaki, a hot shot debris-man with a sailor’s affinity for the orbital ocean; Fee, a chain-smoking tomboy beauty with an abrasive edge; and Pops, a veteran orbital mechanic whose avuncular presence soothes the stress of the job.
Tech Lead Checklist
DAILY
- Require written standup reports each day. Read ALL standup reports. If someone did not write a standup report, contact them by chat or email, and escalate if they do not respond.
- Attend a daily chat. Ask for comments and issues. Make it short. Move long discussions offline.
- Resolve any needs or roadblocks posted in StandUp by a team member in the scrum chat.
- Look at the detailed activity report for each developer.
- Move any request, agreement to a ticket/message/wiki. Do not rely on chat agreements because they can’t be tracked.
- Let team members select their own tasks. Balance load. Do not let team members work on many tickets concurrently. A team member should select one or two tickets to work on and finish. The rest are available for others to select.
- If someone has been working for several days on one ticket, without committing, ask him to split it into smaller tasks.
WEEKLY
- Review all tickets for the current milestone. Add or move depending on schedule and capacity.
- Ask specific developers to take the planning and task breakdown for complex tickets, features, stories. To distribute the load, you should also be getting mockups and stories/scenarios from a non-developer product owner.
- Write and post a message about what the team did last week and what the team will do next week – a sort of scrum of scrums report
BI-WEEKLY TEAM BUILDING
- Look at new developer applications and say who you are interested in. Someone else should handle the details of finding new candidates and then getting them started.
- Do “onboarding”. Make sure each new developer has the information he needs, a development environment, and a simple task. Help the new developers to update the setup documentation. Send them contact information and an outline of the daily requirements (standup, chat, commits).
- Evaluate trial developers near the end of the trial period. Look at all of their work, and evaluate productivity and quality. Write a little review. Say whether you want to continue working with them.