Monthly Archive for January, 2006

I finally completed the first increment of a  dutch website for my company Living Software. This one has been on my backlog for quite some time. The english company site will remain at willemvandenende.com.

The main value I hope to get from this site, is that I noticed it isn’t clear (even to some people I know) how I work, that I have my own company and services etc – I hope this clears it up. Other value is, that I noticed not everyone that attends our courses is 100% comfortable with doing everything in english, and sinds this "agile" stuff stil is spreading slowly in the netherlands, I thought I’d give another site on coaching, training and agile in dutch a shot. (This is the third time I’m doing it. First as an employee, then at my first (shared) company and now as an independent)

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I was having a conversation with Marc yesterday, and he mentioned the false dichotomy between life and work
In case you’re wondering what a false dichotomy is, Pascal van Cauwenberghe recently wrote an analysis of people problem or process problem? that could serve as an example of a false dichotomy.
Making the Living Software site is an instance of how I make the distinction between life and work less and less. I’m following my passions, and make a living out of it at the same time. I enjoy writing, and I enjoy photography, so I used one of my own photographs as a background for the site title and I made the black tree I got from Nynke white so it fits better with the background.

At first I was thinking about doing the site with a (rather elaborate) CMS and link in a weblog. After evaluating textpattern, I decided to try building the whole site with that – so all pages on it have trackback, ping, and comments – a lot of my work is about making feedback loops. If feedback is good, why not have it everywhere on a site? (this weblog still hasn’t, because I’m puzzling about how to keep the links to the 140+ entries working in a new blogging engine).
 In the near future I hope to make the site more self-organizing by adding a tagsonomy to it – the articles all have permanent links, so the structure of the site can vary around that (in any combinations of sections, categories and tags).

There are still a few nits to pick, and many things I want to add, but with a couple of pieces on the background of my company and me being happy enough with the layout, I am good to go, as this site is the simplest thing that could possibly work – at least I’m getting the first value – it’s making it more obvious that I’m independent, and the name of my company is Living Software  .

I bought an hp officejet 4215 last week, because, as a laggard, I finally wanted to have a fax machine so I could improve turnaround time on closing some deals and starting work. I wanted to have another machine, but that was sold out, so I took this one. It has an ADF (Automated Document Feeder). I was expecting it would eat only A4 (or Letter, for those of you living on the other side of the pond). As it happens, it feasts on index cards as well (about ten index cards at a time though). As I was working with Rob on some alternative choreographies for eXperience Agile, we made a bunch of index cards with modules. To archive it and mail the results to Rob, I wanted to scan a batch of index cards. Marc suggested to show, not tell how scanned index cards work (I typed the text of the stories, acceptance criteria in alt tags, in case your aggregator doesn’t show pictures, or you can’t read my handwriting… ):

Installing the scanner was a no brainer ‘apt-get install sane’ (sane is the universal scanner package in linux) and printer and scanner were both autodetected.

To get value from the first story, I scanned the 17 index cards for Rob in a couple of minutes (I was doing other things meanwhile). The scanner takes about 10 cards at a time. I made two small scripts (about 4 lines in total ) to cut the cards in the correct size (10×15 centimeter) and convert everything to jpeg. I chose to use ‘scanimage’, a command line tool, since that was less work than xsane (a graphical front end, more suitable for incidental scanning). I made a zip file of the cards and sent them away. That was cool.

Now I was missing one feature from a table with story cards – shuffling them around. We wanted to make three choreographies, and had made markers on the cards for that. I didn’t quite know what to use for that, so I left it for a couple of days. Then it dawned on me, that OpenOffice Impress ( a presentation package) has a slide sorter that makes it very easy to move slides around. Importing the scanned cards one by one was very cumbersome though. Time for the next story:

Messing with open office xml turned out to be a bit error prone (I didn’t bother to read the spec either. I unzipped the sample presentation I made by hand, looked where the images were and manipulated the xml with rexml ( a ruby library for working with xml as a tree representation). I still officially dislike xml, but used this way it was very simple for me to make my openoffice more valuable to me. To see how it looks and feels, you can download these stories as Impress 2.0 (OpenDocument Presentation format) or stories as PDF.

 
Scanned index cards are handy and fun for sharing course layouts, and possibly also for archiving user stories – with other forms of electronic storage (except digital photos, but scanned cards are easier to read) I miss the visual blips and seeing the cards makes it easier for me to relive bits of a planning meeting when necessary .

Maybe there are more applications . If you’re interested in trying out the script, let me know. It might be fun to release this as open source, but I need to do some work on packaging it then – that would go best with some feedback from early users.

The first XP Day France is going to happen on March 23d! I’ll be running another incrementally improved Balancing Act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage. For our french friends, it has been renamed Des outils simples pour la Communication . My french is a bit rusty, so I’ve started watching TV 5 (a french tv channel) every once in a while.

At SPA2006 (the software practice advancment conference, formerly known as OT) I’ll be co-hosting two sessions with Marc Evers and Emmanuel Gaillot: Balancing Act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage and a new session we came up with especially for the sunday on SPA, These are just some of my favourite tools

These are just some of my favourite tools is an open space session, where we invite the participants to show and/or tell one of their favourite tools, things that make (work) life a lot better. Marc, Emmanuel and I have a preference for ‘people tools’ (e.g. meeting formats, retrospective exercises, iteration choreography), but if you have a more technical tool that’s made you more productive, we’d welcome that too.

As for Balancing Act, we’ve completed the hand outs for the three parts, and are now thinking about running the session in french, as well as perhaps doing the wrap-up of the session slightly differently.