Read as much as you can pt. II

Thanks to Jurgen Appelo for his tremendous work of gathering the top200 of agile and technology related blogs into one OPML-file!

I am currently following 280 blogs! Huge amount, sometimes even daunting, but I’ve learned to skim it through concentrating only on subset of the articles.

Read as much as you can!

Learn from others who have been there before you. There is plenty of advice and experience reports out there. I am currently following 54 different blogs and I here by provide the links in OPML-format (xml-file). Save yourself some time of harvesting good blogs and import this file into your google reader :-)

Where are you 3 years from now?

Every CEO in the world should be able to answer this question immediately “Where is your company in 3 years from now?”. If they can’t, find a new CEO.

Do you have a professional plan? If not, why? Are just a career driftwood?

Everyone should have a plan (not too detailed though). Think about it, if you just react you won’t have conscious guidance there to help you to make the decisions. Instead of always only reacting to different events and situations you could guide your professional career, improvement and learning by having a plan. A rough guide to concentrate your efforts and to make the most out of your experiences. Be proactive. Thus, you get to learn and do what you want.

With a plan you can act instantly, for example, when there is an opportunity that will support your plan and goals. You know where you are going. You know what skills you want to learn. And you want to learn stuff that is of interest to you, don’t you? You know what you want to do, right?

Start by thinking through what do you actually want. Is what you are currently doing exactly what you want to do and are you doing it with the people you want? If you answered no to either question, you should start thinking. We spend roughly 50% of our waking hours at work. If it is not what you want to do then you are wasting quite much of your life.

One important thing to realize is that you should never reach your goal.

The journey is more important than the destination

Stagnation is another word for reaching your goal. Fortunately, human mind works in our favor as by learning more we usually don’t extinguish our thirst for knowledge, instead our thirst is raised to the power of two. We simply want to know more and to improve constantly. So, when reaching a milestone, you’ll probably have a new one in your mind.

It is easy to start, just think about what would be so cool to know or to be good at? For example, I would love to excel in TDD. So for me the first steps are easy. I can start by using TDD more, I can  read about it and the techniques that exist. I can pick up code kata‘s and start doing them with TDD. I could ask someone to mentor me.

Go on, get a plan! Where will you be in 3 years?

10 years in the sw biznez

A decade. Wow. How did that happen?

It’s been an interesting ride. I have survived through 4 personnel reductions during the 10 years so I must provide some value to the Company :-)

I have learned a lot, and I mean a lot. The problem domain has been very challenging with very demanding customers (well, is there any other kind?) in a very demanding environment. Building real time operations support systems for large telco’s is not the easiest thing to do. One could choose easier tasks but then again, one would not learn so much.

Well, recently I have come to the conclusion that my journey towards software craftsmanship has just started. There’s a long way to go and I doubt that I’ll ever finish it. But it is a goal worth of pursuing!

Blog Name Has Changed

I am not so angry anymore. Things are getting better :-) So the new title is The Ways of an Agile Poodle.

Yay!

Creative Slack

Yep, we got it. Without hesitation our suggestion of using some work time to improve our professional selves was accepted.

Most parts of our discussion was spent on implementation details. We argued back and forth between fixed time slot and free placement. The end result was to go for the free placement, since you really can’t force ideas and innovation to arrive at a fixed time of the week. Free placement simply means that at the daily standup a person asks whether it is okay for him to use his slack today regarding the sprint work and others so that his creative slack does impede any other team member. I even used the term gold card from an article I read a long time a go. Now I am considering of actually getting us some physical cards that can be used as symbols of taking the creative slack time.

We agreed that creative slack will give way in urgent cases, but that is acceptable. We have customers that need support so no problems there. We also agreed that the time that can be spent on creative slack is roughly half a day within one two week sprint.  The scope of creative slack was also narrowed down so that it must relate to our work and professional skills at work. We now have the trust and as a team must take the responsibility that creative slack time is not used for slacking.

Big thanks for all of this goes to D. André Dhondt and his blog posts on Creative Slack which inspired me to suggest this and the team to make it happen!