5 Ways Executives Destroy Agile Companies
Photo credit: philozopher via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
A few months ago, a senior executive of a large company asked me, “With our Agile transformation, how am I going to screw it up?”
The question shook me to the core.
June 29, 2017
The Vulnerable Leader
I am scared. I am scared to write this and I am intimidated because my writing will be out in public to be read, critiqued and, in my mind, judged. I am nervous because this is real and it is vulnerable and guess what… I’m telling you, and myself, that it is okay. It ain’t easy, but I guess that means it’s important.
June 28, 2017
How to Hack It: 5 Tech Tips to Improve Your Productivity
I have always been interested in the way things work. As an Agile Project Manager at Metal Toad, I get to take my curiosity one step further and explore not just how things work, but the ways to make them work faster and more efficient as well. For increased efficiency with your daily tasks, I would recommend these five time-saving tech hacks:
June 27, 2017
Why I Love Being of Service at Metal Toad
It may be selfish, I’ll admit it — but I love pleasing others through acts of service. While I work hard and don’t derive my self-confidence or self-worth from it, I certainly derive a whole lot of happiness from it! And who doesn’t want to be happy? That’s why I feel so fortunate that Metal Toad took a chance on me.
June 27, 2017
Celebrating Everyone Through the Power of Design
At Metal Toad, inclusion is important to us. We have our monthly inclusion special interest group (SIG) that works hard to make sure our workplace is inclusionary and to give back to the community. But aside from that, our Toads create inclusionary spaces within our walls on their own accord.
Our Toads are proud of our brand and we can't get them enough swag to sport it. We live our core values of help, respect, curiosity, value, and experience — and part of design's aim is to make sure this…
June 26, 2017
Agile Everything
Chaos is a major pain in the ass. Yes, it can be invigorating, challenging, and propel you in your life or career — but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s extremely hard to appreciate chaos for its creative and life-affirming capabilities when your life feels like it’s careening out of control like a clumsy puppy.
June 24, 2017
Love What You Do and Who You Do It For
Hi. My name is Dan and I am a pessimist and a Senior Software Engineer, hoping to be promoted to a Junior Software Engineer one day.
I feel like I could be considered a job jumper. Why do I switch? Why can’t I find someplace where I can be happy? Why do I find the negative in companies? Does happiness exist? I can honestly say it does.
June 23, 2017
Managing IIS Configuration With Puppet Powershell DSC
Many of us in DevOps/Cloud/Site Reliability/System Engineering have long been using Puppet to manage our Apache and Nginx configurations. However it seems like every Windows deployment I come across using IIS is either not in any form of config management, or is managed through a series of VBScript and PowerShell scripts or System Center.
June 22, 2017
Hosting Django sites with Apache
Django is a fantastic, powerful web development framework. It's great for development, but hosting it can be a bit of a puzzle. WSGI? Daemon mode? What's going on here?
This article will show you the basics of getting your Django sites running on an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.4.x, using WSGI.
Objectives
In this article, we will see how to:
June 22, 2017
Four Pillars of Leadership
Over the years I’ve been asked on many occasions, what is leadership? Having the privilege of working with John Alderson and building upon his lessons has fine-tuned what I believe are the Four Pillars of Leadership that are needed for successfully leading any company or organization (small or large) in any field. It could be video stores, social workers, rock musicians, or developers — I’ve worked with them all.
June 20, 2017
