This week I’ve started with a few of the Claude courses that are freely available on their site, including Claude Code 101¹. Now using it to rework the theme for this site I’m really impressed.

Throughout my career I have been pulled towards backend development as I believed we are closer to absolutes of right and wrong solutions. When working with frontends, everyone has their own personal opinion on look and feel, the wrong shade of blue or the border should be two pixels not one!

Return-to-Office is a topic that has been dividing opinions for years. So I was excited when it came up on the The Curiosity Shop With Brené Brown and Adam Grant1. Brené Brown2 and Adam Grant’s3 conversation covers: organisational psychology, creativity, culture, and mission, the idea of “creative collisions”, and what is really driving leadership decisions on RtO. I can highly recommend the episode. For a more indepth look at the podcast, I have notes here ...

I took the leap and joined my first IndieWeb Homebrew event1 last night. A welcoming group of people, and really well moderated by James2. (I need to figure out how I mention people properly here) IndieWeb’s draw for me is the promise of POSSE3 - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You are not writing for LinkedIn, facebook, medium, X, etc., you are writing for your own site. Then your writing is also published via these other services, which link back as the original source. The important part being that you always own your work, and when services like google+ (yeah, I’m that old) shut down, you are not scrambling to export your data. ...

I’ve done this many times. But this time I mean it. Really! Over the years I’ve tried blogging on many platforms. Early on I even built my own scripts to convert text into HTML which I pushed to an apache server. I’ve tried Apache Roller and Blogger, and about nine years ago I dipped my toes into IndieWeb, setting up a WithKnown site. Most recently I’ve been posting internally at work using GitLab and Jekyll, This is that, but made public. ...

This week has been heavy on presentations. I’ve been volunteering with the Online Scrum Master Summit, co-facilitating some of their sessions. On top of this I’ve been presenting at a couple of work Guild. My home setup has been improving over time as you can see in the image. Having multiple devices, I feel that I have found a way presenting that is working well and is worth sharing. ...

I have just finished reading The LSP method, using the LEGO Serious Play to facilitate meetings. From a young age LEGO had always been one of the main toys in my life and now with children, it is coming back again. The idea of the LEGO Serious Play method has been intriguing me for a while. I have seen local meetups I’ve wanted to attend, but as these were deep in COVID, the idea of being in close proximity to others and sharing LEGO concerned me a little. Then I found “The LSP method” by Michael Fearne in my kindle daily deals. ...

One of the books I read last year was Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller. On their YouTube channel, Agile for Humans, they have been posting daily videos (Your Daily Scrum) where they spend six or seven minutes taking a viewer’s question. Today they posted a new video with Daniel Vacanti, called Fixing your Kanban. In the video they introduced a new website ProKanban.org which plans to be a safe community site where people can come together. Vacanti mentioned seeing sites like scrum.org for the scrum community, and thought that Kanban was missing something like this. The site also linked to the Kanban guide which contains the basic details of Kanban.

At this time of year I am seeing a lot of people post their reading lists from the current year, so feel I need to follow suite. Every year I say I want to read more, but find it hard to do so. The pandemic has given more opportunity to just sit at home, or in the garden and read. Looking back, having set myself the goal of reading one book a month, I can feel pretty satisfied. ...

With the world working remotely, I have managed to join a few meetup sessions which I would not normally have access to. A couple of days ago I was talking with James Coplien1, who along with the likes of Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Grady Booch, founded the the Hillside group2. Inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander3 work in pattern languages they have been running PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) writers workshops. With Jeff Sutherland4 and several other authors, Coplien has documented and collected patterns related to how Scrum teams organise and create value into a scrum book5. Most of these patterns are available online6. It includes all your favourites, from Sprint Goal and Daily Stand-up, to some more guild like patterns, i.e. Birds of a Feather (where similar roles, i.e. BAS or QAs, from different teams get together to share knowledge). ...

I will occasionally look at the special offers on the HumbleBundle website, and at the moment there are a lot that look interesting to me! There is the Mad Scientist collection1, which includes books on making paper gliders, all the way through to rockets and drones. Then there is the DIY electronics collection2 of books on Arduino and Raspberry Pi for your various home projects. And if you want something about programming AI, there is the A.I. bundle3 covering a variety of topics from Statistics, and machine learning algorithms, to neural networks and Tensorflow. ...