The Marriage Retrospective
In popular culture and societal norms there is little space within romantic relationships to air your grievances about your partner. Or, if you do have a “safe” space to share things with your partner about the relationship — that you need couples counseling or a referee. But I’d argue that Agile methodology — that most versatile framework for product development — can even help when it comes to marital happiness.
February 21, 2018
The Four Budget Domains of Enterprise IoT Projects
IoT is rapidly transforming manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and several other industries. The ability to predict asset failure, rapidly diagnosis bottlenecks, and invent new revenue streams are elevating industry standards at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. Executives in these industries have been asking me to give them the basics of what they need to do.
January 28, 2018
Mean Time Between Loss of Sleep
“MTBLS”: I first encountered this phrase on a New Relic blog. It's a half-joking reference to a concept used by reliability engineers, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). I was intrigued though, and thought it would be an interesting metric to track.
We have high-resolution data about our machines' health – down to the smallest minutia – but precious little about the health of our people.
January 26, 2018
Docker Containers & Clustering/Orchestration
The Big Picture
The aim of this blog post isn’t to get into the nitty gritty how to build and run a containerized app on your favorite cloud provider with a specific clustering technology. Rather, the aim is to discuss containers - where they came from, how they differ from VMs, scalability considerations, container repositories, running containers locally, what a container image consists of, and finally clustering and orchestration tools available to manage and maintain your container…
January 20, 2018
How to Integrate GitHub PRs with Bamboo CI
Bamboo / GitHub integration isn't perfect – perhaps because Atlassian wants to steer you towards Bitbucket (their GitHub competitor). Out of the box, there are several headaches. Below, I'll cover these, and how to solve each one:
January 18, 2018
Grokking Bamboo CI/CD, for beginners
We are heavy users of Bamboo for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI / CD). It's extremely flexible, integrates well with Jira, and elastic build agents make the most of AWS EC2 (even giving you the option of spot pricing for on-demand instances).
January 18, 2018
My daily use of the Five Levels of Leadership
Over a year ago, I read John Maxwell’s “The Five Levels of Leadership”. Since then, I’ve grown increasingly reliant on it’s simple model.
January 16, 2018
Want to get your product to market faster? Hire a Scrum Master.
In the practice of Agile Project Management, it has long been assumed that a Scrum Master (also referred to at Metal Toad as Agile Project Manager) is an integral member of any successful Scrum team. Whether it’s through day-to-day facilitation and coaching or the removal of project impediments, the Scrum Master’s value is largely presumed, but sometimes challenged. Recently, my team and I were wondering what value a Scrum Master brings to a Scrum team.
January 15, 2018
Spatial analysis with PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap
I've always been a map geek, dating back to the 1980s when I would take a road atlas and some tracing paper and draw in my own road network. And one of my favorite games is to take an old map or globe and try to determine when it was made based on the names and shapes of countries. In the age of online mapping software, big data, and data science, it gets even more interesting. Now I can download the whole data set for the map and write programs against it!
January 8, 2018
Resolution: Talk to Users in 2018
It’s the end of the year and you’re thinking:
“I did a pretty good job this year. I launched several new high-profile initiatives. Thousands more customers are using the application. I didn’t break anything (that couldn’t be fixed). Man, this year was so busy! Who’s got time to talk to users?”
You do. Make time.
December 27, 2017