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Things I Learned in Grad School #2

2009-11-19T13:18:00Z

Recently we had a guest speaker come in to my marketing class to talk about qualitative research interviews. She had some great advice for interviewing customers and getting valuable information out of them. Here are some tips I learned for conducting customer interviews:

Be Prepared, Yet Flexible. Always have a list of questions, but use them as a guide. Let the content of the interview go where the customer takes it.
Show You Care. It should be obvious to your customer that you care about what he or she has to say. Pay attention! If you don't care, why bother?
Don't Interrupt. Never interrupt your customer while they are telling you a story. Instead, make a note of what you wanted to ask about and ask it when the story is done.
Pause. When the customer is done telling you a story, pause for slightly longer than you normally would, just to be sure they don't have anything else to add.
Be Encouraging. Non-verbal communication (i.e. head-nods) and minor vocalizations (i.e. "Mmhmm") show that you are still paying attention and encourage the customer to keep talking. Also, don't be afraid to probe the customer for more information with short extending questions like "Can you offer additional details?" or "What happened next?"
Don't Talk About Yourself. Customer interviews are NOT a two-way conversation - let the customer do the talking. You won't get accurate information by offering up your own insights and opinions.

I used to think that these techniques could only be used for market research at large companies who are developing new physical products, but after this particular class I started to think about how qualitative research applies to software development. Every one of these tips should be applied to our relationships with customers - especially in our initial meetings.

As developers, we often get ahead of ourselves and start planning out a product before we fully understand what our customers want. In my opinion, the first meeting with a customer should be exactly like a qualitative research interview. Allow the customer to talk at length about what they need and what kinds of problems they are trying to solve with the software. Show them you care about what they have to say and hold off on offering up your personal opinions. By structuring our initial meetings this way, we can get a clear, unbiased picture of the situation and create better solutions for our customers.

Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women

2009-10-26T00:02:00Z

This past weekend I volunteered to be a Teacher's Assistant at the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women at Harvard University in Boston. I have to say that I was really impressed by the whole event. Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei started doing these workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm really glad that Sarah Allen made her way to Boston so we could have one too. There was a great turnout; a mixture of women of all skill levels and ages, and yes, there were some men there too. It was really refreshing to be in a room full of so many kinds of women programming Ruby on Rails.

In her intro, Sarah described her hope to one day attend a meetup where she did not "personally double the number of women" in the room. I certainly know what that's like, and I'm so happy I made the choice to donate a Saturday to this event. This workshop felt so different than any Ruby or Rails event I've attended. There was no judgement, no attitude, no "are you really a rails developer?" - there was just a bunch of people who wanted to learn and some other people who wanted to help.

Thanks so much to Liana Leahy and Mary Tolbert for organizing this event, and to Sarah Allen and Andy Gregorowicz for presenting to the group.

You can read more about the workshop in some post-workshop blog posts from Liana, Sarah, and Andy.

Things I Learned in Grad School #1: NDAs & Trade Secrets

2009-10-12T22:01:00Z

So I've been in grad school for about a month now, and it's going really well so far. It's a ton of work, but my classes are super interesting so I can't really complain too much. :) I decided that I should start a new series of articles on this site, henceforth to be known as "Things I Learned in Grad School." As you probably can gather from my oh-so-creative title, I plan on doing a series of short posts with some random but useful things I learn while I'm at school. So let's hit the ground running with a couple of little tidbits I learned in my Intellectual Property class!

NDA's & Trade Secrets

Did you know that it's not always necessary to make your employees or partners sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)? Or if you're the employee, did you know that if you haven't signed an NDA you are still obligated to keep your employer's trade secrets private? Though an NDA is the easiest way to prove in court that ideas were supposed to be kept private, it's not the only way to win a case of stolen secrets. Your ideas and trade secrets are automatically protected by trade secret law as long as you make a reasonable effort to keep them secret. There are also some relationships (such as employer/employee) where the law assumes confidentiality. So if you haven't signed an NDA, don't assume you can shout other people's secrets from the rooftops, and make sure you know your rights if someone's shouting yours.

P.S. This information is based on United States laws. I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but if you know please enlighten me in the comments. Cheers!

I'm Back!

2009-07-14T22:15:00Z

Oh hey there... it's been a while, eh? I've been just a teensy bit busy saying goodbye to New Zealand, traveling around Australia, flying back to the US, emptying my storage unit in AZ, packing my life into 2 small vehicles, driving across the country, catching up with fam & friends, and finding a place to live in Boston. But enough with the excuses, I'm back now!

For those that didn't know, I'm going back to school this fall at Northeastern University. I'm super psyched about getting a master's but a little nervous at the same time. It's weird to be doing the school thing again. Anyways, I'm moving to an apartment in Boston in a couple weeks, so I have a new community to infiltrate! If you're in town, let's hang. :)

P.S. I'm also looking for part-time rails work in the city (or I'm willing to work remotely) while I'm in school, so if you know anyone with an opening, I'm all ears!

SonarHQ - Online Polls & Surveys

2009-04-23T07:45:00Z

My last few months have been dedicated to the development of Boost's new online survey tool, SonarHQ. This past week, we released SonarHQ into Beta, and its live for you to use! It's exciting to see it out in the wild... we hope you enjoy it! We'd love to hear your feedback so check it out and let us know what you think. Here's a bit more information about SonarHQ:

What SonarHQ Does

Directly from the SonarHQ homepage:

Fulfill your consultation requirements
Build two-way conversations with your customers
Develop groups for ongoing surveys
Create one-off surveys and questionnaires
Easily create beautiful graphs and reports
Easily administer your feedback and reports
Quickly arrange findings for private or public analysis
Keep your stakeholders well informed.

In my own words:

SonarHQ is, in short, an online polling system. It is especially useful for people who are interested in building a community of members that they can poll about certain topics. SonarHQ was extracted from older code that runs The Couch, a community of New Zealand families. SonarHQ allows you to easily create polls, collect answers, and report on your findings - all on your very own website.

The Tech Specs

SonarHQ is a Ruby on Rails application. It's currently running Rails v2.2 on a SliceHost Ubuntu server. We're using Workling/Starling for background processes and we've rolled our own flash graphs for charting poll results. The app is (mostly) RESTful and we're leveraging that fact in order to create reports for ourselves via ActiveResource. We're using Chartbeat and New Relic to monitor the application and we've got a Tender app set up for support.

So that's about it. Go take a little looksie and then sign up! Play around and be sure to let us know what you think. :)

Burned by Workling & Starling

2009-03-28T03:48:00Z

I'm using the Workling Plugin with Starling on my project at Boost to run processes in the background. Recently, we deployed 2 projects on the same server, and rather than run 2 separate instances of Starling, we just let both apps talk to the same Starling instance. All was well with the world until I noticed that one of my apps was mysteriously creating records in the other app's database. Burn! It appeared that Starling didn't know which app the processes belonged to, so it was always running them on 1 app and never the other one. Eeek!

Thankfully, this was easily remedied by revisiting the options for my workling.yml file in the Workling README:

Workling copies a file called workling.yml into your applications config directory. 
The config file tells Workling on which port Starling is listening. 

Notice that the default production port is 15151. This means you'll need to start 
Starling with -p 15151 on production. 

You can also use this config file to pass configuration options to the memcache 
client which workling uses to connect to starling. use the key 'memcache_options' for this. 

You can also set sleep time for each Worker. See the key 'listeners' for this. 
Put in the modularized Class name as a key. 

    development:
      listens_on: localhost:22122
      sleep_time: 2
      reset_time: 30
      listeners:
        Util:
          sleep_time: 20
      memcache_options:
        namespace: myapp_development
        
    production:
      listens_on: localhost:22122, localhost:221223, localhost:221224
      sleep_time: 2
      reset_time: 30

See that key under memcache_options? Namespace to the rescue! If you set this in your workling.yml file, your Starling instance will never be confused again. Just a quick tip so you don't get burned like I did. Good luck!

Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-25T00:10:00Z

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." I only just found out about it, so unfortunately I don't have an article prepared, but I wanted to help by raising a little awareness and inviting you to go read some of the articles that have been published today in honor of women in technology. Here are a few to get started:

Ada Lovelace Day - Finding Ada by Desi McAdam
Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora by Mackenzie Morgan
Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day by Audrey Eschright
Ada Lovelace Day - Grace Hopper by Brenda Wallace
Ada Lovelace Day by Liz Henry
Ada Lovelace Day: Tribute to Suw Charman-Anderson by Kevin Anderson (Husband of Suw Charman-Anderson, creator of Ada Lovelace Day)

There are several more links to articles on the pledge website. Even if you don't sign the pledge or write a post, today I encourage you to think about all the tech women you know & celebrate them. :)

Webstock Highlights: Day 2

2009-03-09T00:28:00Z

So Day 2 at Webstock was just as fab as Day 1. As promised, I put together a few of my favorites from Day 2.

Derek Featherstone - Madame Butterfly

Derek's talk was about accessibility. It was a great session, and it made me realize that accessibility is not something I really think about, but it definitely should be. One thing he said that I really liked was this: "Just because something is compliant doesn't mean it's easy to use." I think this statement applies to so much more than accessibility. We need to focus on user experience as well as standards compliance. In addition to that, Derek totally wowed me with some of the things he's working on using Ubiquity to improve accessibility.

Joshua Porter - Designing Sign Up Screens & Flows

After hearing this talk, Joshua Porter's book, Designing for the Social Web, went directly onto my wish list. He had so many valuable tips about signup processes, most notably the fact that the form is not the problem with signup - the problem is changing peoples minds about your software. While the form can certainly be an obstacle, the process is much more important. Specifically, I liked the way Josh described the three types of people you should design for: the people who already know they want to sign up, the people who want more information to make sure your product is for them, and the skeptics. It was quite interesting to think about a signup process in this 3-tiered manner.

Bruce Sterling - The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0, And What Comes Afterward

I'll let you read the transcript and draw your own conclusions about this one. :)

Damian Conway - Web 2.0.1.

I thought this was a great way to end Webstock. Damian Conway sent us forth with a mission to implement the "Theory of Hippocratic Web Design". He said that we can collectively change our ideals and become people who really care about those we serve. The practices for Damian's theory seem so simple, but often they get overlooked. These things should be part of how we work everyday.

Learn and share good practices
Do your best work
Know your own limitations - don't pretend you're an expert in technologies that you're not.
Work in your client's best interest - don't screw them over!
Be professional

So by now I think I have sufficiently convinced you that Webstock contained heaps (as the kiwis say) of awesomeness. I'm so glad I went and I hope to get the chance to attend future Webstocks. Thanks to all the speakers and all the fun people that took the time to chat with me!

Webstock Highlights: Day 1

2009-02-24T06:34:00Z

Well friends, Webstock is over and it turned out to be totally awesome. It was well-planned, well-executed, and loaded with high-quality content. I had the opportunity to meet/chat with one of the organizers, Mike Brown, and he is not only an all-star conference planner, but a genuinely nice dude. There was so much awesomeness from the speakers that I'm going to split my overview into two posts: one for each day of the conference. My highlights from the presentations on Day 1 are as follows:

Jane McGonigal - Gaming Reality

First of all, Jane is just an incredibly cool person. She's fun to chat with and, quite frankly, cookies make me happy too. :) Her talk made some great points about how games really optimize human experience by appealing directly to the things that humans crave:

having satisfying work to do
being good at something
spending time with people we like
having the chance to be a part of something bigger

One of the points she made toward the end really stuck with me. She said that considering the current state of our world (climate change, sucky economy, etc.), we all need to become "game developers" and apply these things to all of the software we create. We should be thinking about how to structure user experience to make people happier, and how to develop systems that really make people awesome.

Matt Biddulph - Made of Messages

In this talk Matt discussed background processing and said that we should perform only the most basic calculations up front and show the user only what effects their world at that moment. The complex calculations can be put on a queue to be processed later. One of the things Matt mentioned really made me think. What does background processing do to interaction design? Now, I'm no designer, but I've never really thought to mention to the designer that I'm working with that some process is happening in the background and the information may not be available immediately. It seems now like something they should definitely know about in order to not mislead the user or create confusion.

Heather Champ - Shepherding Passionate Communities

Heather Champ, of Flickr, gave an insightful talk about 7 lessons she learned while managing the passionate flickr community. She had a lot of good stuff to say, but there were two that I liked best. First, Heather said that feedback has a lifecycle. The feedback you get in the first 48 hours is usually full of gut reactions to change, whereas over a 2 week period you get more thoughtful feedback. The second one I liked was this: Own your failure. If you screw up, tell your users you screwed up without making excuses. Then turn it into something fun.

Michael Lopp - Being Geek

This was a really fun talk and affirmed my suspicion that I am a total nerd/geek. But definitely not a dork. :) He talked about the cliches of being geek and what they mean about our personalities. Nerds are supposedly good with computers, obsessive, and awkward. But in actuality we just love puzzles, don't want you touching our stuff, and are always trying to figure out how people fit into our system. :)

The rest of the speakers from Day 1 were just as good: Nat Torkington, Cameron Adams, Derek Powazek, Adrian Holovaty , and the ever-hilarious Ze Frank. For the sake of keeping this less than a zillion words, I won't summarize them all, but I was truly impressed with the quality of the speakers as well as their content.

Stay tuned for thoughts on Day 2.

Fun Times in Wellington

2009-01-22T05:13:00Z

I realized that I haven't written yet about some of the events I've been to in Wellington, so I thought I'd give y'all an idea of what I've been doing for the past 3 months. I've been trying to infiltrate the nerd community here and meet as many people as I can, so here's a few of the events I've attended and what I thought of them.

WellRailed (November)

WellRailed is the Ruby on Rails group in Wellington. I've been subscribed to the mailing list for a while now, and it was cool to meet some of the people that I see writing on the list all the time. I liked the style of the meeting and I thought it was productive. It started with drinks, pizza, and socializing, and then moved into two short talks by Paul Flewelling (i18n in Rails 2) and Will Bryant (submitting a patch to Rails on github). I'm looking forward to attending more of these meetings before I leave NZ.

Tweet-Up (November)

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I thought this was a great event for meeting people, and following new people on twitter helps me keep up with what's going on in Wellington.

Women in Technology (December)

I happened to stumble across the Women in Technology website one day and was quite intrigued. I emailed and asked if I could attend one of their meetings just to see what it was about. When I got there, I quickly realized that their idea of 'technology' was not quite the same as mine - i.e. it was not a room full of programmers, but women who use any type of technology in the workplace. I did, however, really enjoy the presentation. A woman from Auckland talked to us about how to properly give a presentation. It's really amazing to learn from someone while they demonstrate just how much they know about their subject. She was an excellent presenter.

Girl Geeks (December)

Last year Erica and I attended a Girl Geek Dinner Event in San Francisco, so when I saw that Wellington had a Girl Geek Community I was pretty excited. I went to their Girl Geek Drinks event and there was a great turnout! It was so nice to meet a bunch of girl geeks in Wellington. I hope to be able to attend more of these events while I'm here.

Webstock (February)

Next month I'll be attending Webstock! I am really looking forward it, and will surely post here about my Webstock experience. Hope to see you there!

P.S. In other news, Dan and I had a lovely holiday traveling around NZ's South Island. You can check out the photos on my flickr.

My 6th Photo

2008-12-15T20:14:00Z

So I have been tagged in "The 6th Meme" by this clown. I have been instructed to post the 6th photo on the 6th page of my flickr stream, so here it is:

This photo was taken on the last day of my Fiji trip, in the Garden of the Sleeping Giant, just outside Nadi. This pond with all the lily pads was my favorite part of the garden.

I hereby tag the following people to post their 6th photo and pass it on:

Ready, set, go!

Validating Uniqueness with Acts As Paranoid

2008-11-26T00:07:00Z

I've recently been using Rick Olson's plugin, acts_as_paranoid, to mark records as deleted rather than actually destroying them. When I had my model acting very paranoid, I found myself wanting to ignore the 'deleted' records when validating newly created records. For instance, I have an Account model:

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base

acts_as_paranoid

#Validations
validates_uniqueness_of :subdomain
end

As it stands, when I create a new account object with a subdomain of "foo" and try to save it, it will be invalid even if the existing record with the "foo" subdomain has been marked as deleted. I needed to treat the deleted records as if they no longer existed. To remedy this problem, I overwrote validates_uniqueness_of inside acts_as_paranoid to take an option to exclude deleted records.

So after updating the plugin, I can pass the :without_deleted => true option to validates_uniqueness_of and the record will be valid if no other active records have the same subdomain. Here's the whopping 1/2 line change to the model:

class Account < ActiveRecord::Base

acts_as_paranoid

#Validations
validates_uniqueness_of :subdomain, :without_deleted => true
end

And that's it! Pretty simple change, but I found it useful. I don't know if this is something anyone else needs to do, but feel free to grab my version of acts_as_paranoid from my github repository if it helps.

Saying Kia Ora to Wellington and Boost

2008-10-19T02:08:00Z

I wrote recently about leaving Integrum, but I failed to mention that I was also leaving the country... :)

I decided a few months back that I wanted to live and work abroad for a few months, and after some searching around, I chose New Zealand. It's weird that it has finally arrived, but I am happy to say that I've just moved in to a flat in Wellington. I've never been to the South Pacific before, so I'm excited about the opportunity to see this part of the world. So far Wellington has been amazing! The city is so pretty and I love being close to the water. Our flatmates are super nice and have been very helpful in getting us settled in.

Tomorrow I start my new job at Boost New Media in downtown Wellington. I met the team on Friday, and they seem like such a fun bunch! I definitely want to check out the local rails scene and meet lots of people, so please get in touch if you are in the area. Oh, and if you need design stuff done, Dan is available and looking for contract work. :)

See you around Wellington!

Saying Goodbye to Integrum

2008-09-25T17:34:00Z

1 year, 10 months, and 21 days ago, I walked in to the Integrum offices for my first day of work. I had no prior professional experience and I was scared out of my mind. I have recently decided to leave Integrum to pursue other opportunities (which I will write about soon), so tomorrow is my last day at Integrum. I thought it appropriate to publicly say goodbye, and more importantly, thanks, to all who influenced my time there.

I was so surprised when I received the email from Jade originally offering me a job. With my lack of experience, I never expected it, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity I was given. To Jade - It was a leap of faith to hire me and believe in me, and I can only hope I've made it a worthwhile choice.

Through all the changes I've seen the company go through, the best part about working at Integrum has always been it's people. I could not have asked for better coworkers - you guys are such intelligent people with incredible ideas and potential to do big things. I owe each and every one of you a huge thank you for making me the software developer I am today, not to mention the person I am today.

I'm not good at goodbyes, but what I'm really trying to say is: Thanks and I <3><3>

Edward Tufte

2008-08-25T04:31:00Z

This past week I had the opportunity to attend Edward Tufte's one-day course in San Diego, CA. The course was on presenting data and information, and it turned out to be really interesting stuff. I took some notes, which certainly do not do it justice, but I thought I'd post them here anyway.

Some tips on presenting information in charts:

Annotate lines in charts (bring character to the linking lines) - give them meaning, otherwise they are all the same and don't really mean anything.
The nouns should also be annotated - the detail is what gives the credibility and character.
"Clutter and confusion are not attributes of detail - they are failures in design." Replace the "chart-chunk" with information.
Keep in mind that the audience has to understand your story and decide whether they believe you or not - it depends on the quality of your presentation and sources.
"You should have an open mind about alternatives, but not an empty head" - Your information is accurate at least until better evidence or alternative explanations come along.

Using a "Super Graphic:"

High resolution displays are genuinely interactive - Use a high resolution display, like an aerial photograph, to open your presentation.
PowerPoint presenters usually control and manipulate the cognitive actions of the audience - they have a monopoly over the display of information. You should give handouts and let people use their own cognitive style.

The principles of analytical design:

Show comparisons
Show causality, explanation
Show multivariate data
Integration of information - "Never segregate information by its mode of production."
Documentation - give links/credibility. Show people where the information came from. ("This is what 6pt font is for - it should be small but it should be there.")

At the end of the course, Tufte gave a few simple tips for giving a presentation:

You can make the big gains in improving your presentation by getting better content. Improve relevance and integrity of content.
Rehearsal improves performance. Rehearse to a friend or watch a video of your performance.
Show up early to your own presentation.
In your introduction, never apologize.
Finish early. People will be delighted.

Tufte stresses that humans can process much more information than is usually presented to them. All of his methods for presenting data strive to increase the "information throughput." Tufte also said, "No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it." We should be trying to maximize the time that the audience spends reasoning with content, and minimizing the time they spend figuring out the design.

I'm really looking forward to reading Tufte's four books now that I've seen him speak. He was engaging and had a lot of great points, and I would recommend going to see him if he comes to a place near you.

P.S. Matt's notes are also online, in all their handwritten glory.

Books, Books, and More Books

2008-07-30T14:53:00Z

I've recently gotten back into reading, and have been trying to read at least a little bit every day. I always feel a sense of accomplishment after I finish a book, since I get so much more out of them than most other things these days. I really enjoy books based on true stories, inspirational books, and sometimes technical books. I mostly read books that have been recommended to me, so I thought I'd post my reading list here for you all to peruse. If you have any recommendations, please leave a comment!

Recently Read

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Escape by Carolyn Jessop

Currently Reading

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Ben Zander
Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck

In the Queue

The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille
The Exceptional Presenter by Timothy J. Koegel

What are you reading?

RailsConf '08 Recap

2008-06-03T15:31:00Z

Well we made it back from Portland after a great weekend at RailsConf. I had mentioned that I wanted to learn a few things and meet a few people, and I'm happy to say I did just that. I think that this year, the meeting people was more important to me than the sessions. That said, I think there are a handful worth mentioning.

Surviving the big rewrite, moving yellowpages.com to rails, John Straw

It was pretty cool to hear how yellowpages.com just decided to rewrite their entire system in rails, and did it with only about 3-4 months of development. Impressive. John Straw attributes the success to a few things:

Having a small development team
Choosing the right platform
Having close communication among team members with diverse viewpoints
Freezing development on the existing site in order to prevent having to hit a moving target
Updating the beta site frequently to easily communicate progress

The Launch: Dos and Don'ts of Real Life Deploys, Chris Wanstrath

Chris Wanstrath went through the stages of deployment: Alpha, Beta, Optimization, Launch, Panic, and Calm. It was cool to hear him talk about his real-life projects, famspam and the famous github, and what he experienced during deployment. I took away from this talk that Alpha and Beta phases are great tools to get feedback from your users and uncover any bugs. It also allows you to assess what really needs optimization before the real launch. Also, something goes wrong in almost every launch, so expect that there will be downtime.

Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps, Scott Chacon

OK, all I can say about this one is that this guy talks really fast and knows a TON about git. There is good info about the talk here and you can check out his gitcasts for some more git goodness.

Scaling Rails, Blaine Cook, Bradley Taylor, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jim Meyer, Kevin Lawver

There were a couple of quotes from this talk that I thought were insightful. The first was Ezra, who said "the most important thing is getting your application out there and getting the opportunity to have to make it scale." I think that's great because it seems as though a lot of people try to prematurely optimize. Just get it out there, see where the weaknesses are, and then you can spend meaningful hours making it scale. The other quote I liked was from Blaine Cook, of Twitter, who said the biggest mistake developers make is "assuming the production environment is exactly like the development environment." I don't have a lot of experience with real deployments, so this one stuck with me. I hope I remember it when it counts.

ActiveRecord Associations and the Proxy Pattern, Nick Kallen

This was the talk that really made me say, "Wow." Nick Kallen flawlessly coded for the entire session, showing the audience the basics behind ActiveRecord associations. I can't say I've ever thought about what I would do if :has_many didn't exist, and it was really cool to watch him go through the steps... and writing tests first.

Other highlights of RailsConf 08 include but are not limited to:

My railsconf t-shirt that actually fits!
Hanging out with about 30 other women developers at the DevChix meetup. Thanks again to Desi for getting us all together and Obie for picking up the tab. :)
The moment when DHH accidentally bumped into me... 'cause he's so dreamy. sigh. (HA you know I'm joking, right? :) )
Visiting the monstrosity that is Powell's bookstore. I'll be reading for months!
Being pinged in the #railsconf irc channel by someone who reads my blog! Yay for readers!
This picture of me clearly looking at my laptop and not paying attention to whoever was speaking, taken by James Duncan Davidson.

All in all it was a great weekend. See you next year in Vegas.

RailsConf 2008, Here I Come

2008-05-29T03:26:00Z

RailsConf is this weekend! I, along with the rest of the Integrum team, will be arriving in Portland tomorrow (Thursday) evening, so find us and say hello! I hope to learn a few things and meet a few people, and I'll be sure to post notes and thoughts here next week sometime. Should be a fun time, hope to see you there!

Bowl for Kids Sake 2008

2008-05-06T02:16:00Z

At the beginning of the year, the Integrum team compiled a list of company goals for 2008. One of our goals was to participate in a charity event in order to give back to the community. On June 7th, the Integrum team will be participating in Big Brothers Big Sisters annual Bowl for Kids Sake event.

If you'd like to help us reach our goal, please visit my page or our team page to donate online. Every little bit counts, and we really appreciate your support!

Mid-twenties

2008-04-26T23:47:00Z

Last week I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday, and my crossover into my 'mid-twenties.' Ahhhh I'm such an old fart! :) It got me to thinking about whether or not I'm happy with what I've done in the last 24 years, and I must say that overall, I'm pretty proud of myself.

I wanted to say thanks to everyone who celebrated my birthday with me and made it amazing. I must say I felt more appreciated than I have in a long time. The day was full of lovely birthday treats, just look at this stuff!!

Thanks to Heidmo&Aeree, Gist, Dan, Mom, Steph and Jenna for all the goodies, and everyone else for all the birthday wishes!!

Here's to the 25th year!

CSS Naked Day '08

2008-04-09T15:06:00Z

I’ve removed my stylesheet today to participate in CSS Naked Day. Here is the official description of this event:

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.

So go get naked, everybody’s doin’ it!

Agile Estimating and Planning

2008-04-07T04:38:00Z

I've been working on reading Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn, so I figured I would post my notes here as a follow up to my notes on Extreme Programming Explained. The book starts by introducing the purpose of planning, and why traditional methods of planning fail. Right from the beginning (even the title), it stresses that the estimating and planning process itself must be agile. Planning should reveal what should be done and when, and estimating should reveal how big a project really is.

The Purpose of Planning

Planning is an attempt to answer "What should we build?" through consideration of features, resources, and schedules.
Planning supports better decision-making, establishes trust, and helps set appropriate expectations.
"The most critical risk facing most projects is the risk of developing the wrong product." - Planning can help reduce the risk of uncertainty and take the guess-work out of developing without a plan.
"The knowledge and insight we gain from planning persists log after one plan is torn up and a revised one put in it's place." - We should be eager to change the plan; it means that we have either learned something or have come up with a better idea.
Don't try to plan an entire project at the beginning. Agile planning should be spread evenly across the project's duration.

The reason I picked up this book was to read about release and iteration planning, so those are the parts I will highlight here. I have never personally be involved in a release planning meeting, and we talk a lot at Integrum about how we need to be better about release planning. We've also tested out a handful of iteration planning techniques, so I was really interested in what this book had to say.

Release Planning

Release planning produces a high-level plan that involves about 3-6 months worth of work. It helps the product owner and the team decide how long it will be before they have a releasable product. It sets expectations about the time-frame for a project - what will be done, and when? The author says, "without the concept of a release, teams move endlessly from one iteration to the next." I can attest, it is disheartening to developers to work and work without a release in sight. The steps of release planning are as follows:

Determine criteria that will make the project a success or failure. (Based on the company's goals)
Estimate the user stories.
Choose the length of your iterations.
Estimate velocity. (Planning Poker)
Have the product owner prioritize the user stories according to what is most valuable to the success of the product.
Select stories to be completed for the current release and set a date.
Revisit the release plan after every iteration.

Iteration Planning

Iteration planning provides a short-term, detailed view of the work for one iteration within a project's release. It helps lead the team into a discussion about product design and set expectations for the customer about what features will be completed in the current iteration. The result of an iteration planning session should be a spreadsheet or index cards stating the stories, as well as tasks that go with each story. The book outlines two types of iteration planning; Velocity-driven and Commitment-driven.

Velocity-driven planning involves determining the target velocity based on an average of past iterations, then choosing the top prioritized stories that will fit within that velocity.

Commitment-driven planning involves choosing the top prioritized story from the backlog, writing tasks for that story, and then asking the team if they can commit to delivering that entire story in the current iteration. This process is repeated until the team can no longer add stories to the iteration.

The team at Integrum has tried both these methods of iteration planning. We recently switched back to velocity-driven planning, since the general feeling was that commitment-driven planning created too much overhead. Mike Cohn recommends commitment-driven planning because he feels it is more accurate than relying on story points and "yesterday's weather." What do you think?

Tips for Iteration Planning

Don't allocate tasks to certain pairs/individuals during iteration planning. It takes away from the "all in it together" attitude.
Organize stories and tasks so it is easy to tell what task goes with what story.
Don't get too far into a discussion about design. All you need at the time of iteration planning is guesses about the work to be completed.

These are just the highlights I took from Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn. For more information, go read it yourself! Please comment with thoughts or experiences on release/iteration planning. Thanks!

My Six-word Memoir

2008-03-25T03:07:00Z

I mentioned before that I was still working on my six-word memoir. It's really hard to convey your life in only six words. After much thought, I came up with something that I think suits me pretty well. I can't explain it, because then it would be a 100-word memoir, so use your imagination. :)

"Well that was fun. What now?"

What's yours?

My first SXSW

2008-03-20T14:40:00Z

Last week I had the privilege of attending my first SXSW. Overall I'd say it was a good experience, though I wish I was more of an go-chat-it-up-with-anyone kinda girl. I tend to stick with the people I know, and SXSW is definitely a place I'd have liked to branch out.

Unfortunately, due to a family matter I had to attend to in CT, I didn't arrive in Austin until Sunday, and the rest of the team was already in the SXSW groove. I quickly dropped my bags at the Integrum house and hustled over to the convention center. I was there just in time to pick up my badge and grab a seat in the 3:30pm session. I made it to two sessions on Sunday, and here's my synopsis of them.

Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users, by Kathy Sierra

There are several other people who have posted notes on this talk, so I won't be too redundant. I think she made a lot of good points, but in general, the gist was that you should not be worried about whether or not you kick ass. You should be worried about how to make your users feel like they kick ass. It makes almost too much sense; if your app makes people feel like rock stars, they are sure to keep coming back.

LOLWUT? Why Do I Keep Coming Back to This Website?, by Ben Huh and Eric Nakagawa

There isn't too much to say about this session other than that these guys are hilarious. When Eric Nakagawa leaned into the microphone to begin the session and said, "Oh Hai," I knew it was going to be good. They basically just summed up their journey since the beginning of icanhascheezeburger. I was dissappointed, however, that I didn't get my hands on one of the cheeseburgers they provided for the audience. Shucks. kthxbye.

Sunday night I went geekbowling with some integremlins, and then hit the hay so I could squeeze in a full day of sessions on Monday.

The Art of Self-Branding, by Lea Alcantara

I was expecting to get a little more out of this session. Lea Alcantara used two companies as examples for a talk about self-branding. Then when asked for examples of individuals who have branded themselves well, she said, "Madonna." With no disrespect to The Immaculate Collection, I thought this was an irrelevant answer considering the audience. She did give some useful information though, including her 5 aspects of a successful brand:

Relevance: Do you make sense?
Creative Design: Does your look match?
Message Communication: Do you talk the talk?
Understanding Customer: Do you know who you're talking to?
Consistency: Can we expect the same quality in everything you say/touch/do?

She also said, "Talent is not enough, perception is almost everything." Which I wish weren't true, but I totally agree with.

I don't have much to say about the rest of the sessions I went to on Monday, except that I am still trying to write my six-word memoir. Maybe I'll post it here when I come up with it. :)

Monday night I attended the Facebook party with Chris and Matt, but no sign of Zuckerberg. :(

Tuesday morning I skipped out on some sessions to visit the office of Red Fly Studios, since Erica has a friend (Kris) that works there. The office was super nice, and they even let us play around with a game they are working on! Thanks to the guys at Red Fly Studios for giving us a peek into the game industry. After lunch, a couple of sessions were worth mentioning:

Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together, by Paul Hammond, Simon Willison, George Oates, Matt Biddulph, and Dave Shea

I really enjoyed this panel. It was so interesting to hear people (developers and designers) from different types of companies talk about collaboration. What I got out of this panel:

Technical Wife/Design Husband - it should be a partnership.
Decisions should be made together and with reason.
White-boarding sessions, including designers and developers should happen early in a project and often.

Taking Over the World: the Flickr Way, by Simon Batistoni

This was a really interesting talk for me, since I've been working with internationalizing a project for quite some time now. Many of the things Simon learned while internationalizing flickr, we at Integrum have also learned on a client project of ours. It was almost refreshing to hear that someone else has gone through the same pains of internationalizing an app. I won't go through all the details of what to do, but he said his presentation would be posted here. (Not there yet, but hopefully soon.)

And then, after eating dinner and making brief appearance at the Digg party, my SXSW experience came to a close. Overall, I had fun and I learned a few things. Phew! This was longer than I thought it'd be, thanks for sticking it out. Cheers. :)

ooochie.com, now even hotter than my macbook air!

2008-03-16T22:39:00Z

Feast your eyes on the brand spankin' new version of ooochie.com! I'm so so so excited for the new look of my site, I mean, just check out my awesome feed robot! Many many thanks go to Dan Ritzenthaler of Forty Agency for ooochie.com's amazing new look! Let me know what you think. :)

Macbook Air, so hot right now

2008-03-13T20:26:00Z

Yesterday was a very exciting day in my life - When I arrived home from SXSW (which I will get my stuff together and write about very soon), my very own Macbook Air was waiting for me! It is oh-so-pretty and I'm already in love with it. Check out the unwrapping here.

Yay!

Fun Times in San Francisco

2008-02-05T05:29:00Z

Last Thursday, Erica and I headed out to San Francisco to attend the first annual Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner. We ended up having a really great weekend meeting people and listening to panelists at the dinner, as well as visiting with the team at Pivotal Labs the following day.

According to the Women 2.0 post (who sponsored the Girl Geek Dinner) over 600 people showed up at Google's Mountain View campus to network and listen to the panelists (Yes, Google really does have heated toilet seats!). I think its wonderful that so many attended, Phoenix would surely have a much smaller turnout. The topic of the evening was "building credibility and reputation in technology and business." While I really enjoyed listening to the panelists, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I thought there would be more specific advice about how to promote yourself as a woman in the tech world, and I found most of the advice pretty general (i.e. Believe in yourself, don't let people tell you you don't belong in tech, don't be afraid to disagree, etc.). Aside from that, I found the event truly inspirational. All four women on the panel -- Leah Culver (Co-Founder and Lead Developer, Pownce), Sumaya Kazi (Entrepreneur and Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems), Irene Au (Director of User Experience, Google), and Rashmi Sinha (CEO, SlideShare) -- have done very well for themselves, and it was great to hear them talk about the steps they've taken to get where they are. Some of the things I took away were the following:

Contribute to open source projects. (Leah Culver)
Write articles that show your personality.(Sumaya Kazi)
Don't forget to network. (Irene Au)
You have to have a thick skin. Decide what parts of yourself you want to put out there, try not to post personal things. (Rashmi Sinha)

In addition to the panel, the Girl Geek Event was really about networking. Erica and I had the chance privilege of meeting Arena Reed, a designer at Pivotal Labs. Integrum and Pivotal are both agile shops, so it was interesting to chat with Arena about process - something we've been talking about a lot lately at Integrum. Arena was nice enough to invite us to the Pivotal office Friday morning to see how they operate and talk with some of the other employees. It was very reassuring to see a shop working so well with agile, and I'm optimistic that Integrum will find what works best for us soon enough. Thanks everyone at Pivotal for being so welcoming!

It turned out to be a great couple of days in San Francisco, thanks again to Angie Chang of Women 2.0 and Pivotal Labs for making it an enjoyable and productive trip!

Skydiving!

2008-01-29T14:56:00Z

A great rails guru once told me, "If you didn't blog it, it didn't happen." So I figured I better blog about this one... I went skydiving! It was awesome and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't been. Here is part of the video they took of me jumping out an airplane at 13000ft!

Girl Geeks

2008-01-22T02:17:00Z

Just an FYI, the Integrum girls (myself and Erica) will be attending the first Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on January 31. I think it will be a great opportunity to meet people and hear some interesting speakers. (I'm also pretty excited to see the Google Campus in Mountain View!) Unfortunately, registration is already closed, but if you're attending find us and say hello! When we get back I'll be sure to post my thoughts/notes on the event. Hope to see you there!

Happy Anniversary to me

2007-12-04T14:54:00Z

I can't really believe I'm saying this, but as of today I have been working at Integrum for one whole year. It's true what they say you know, time really does fly when you're having fun! Last year around this time, I was starting to have serious doubts about my choice of degree, thinking that I might not ever find a job in my field that did not involve a cubicle or a serious lack of human interaction. But then, a craigslist ad and an interview later, I was starting my first day at Integrum.

I had some serious anxiety about going in there that day. But now, a year later, I can say it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from some extremely talented people, and have had tons of fun doing it.

So anyway, a big thanks to the Integrum gang for just being awesome. :)

Facebook Developer's Garage - Phoenix

2007-11-15T17:55:00Z

Last night I attended the Facebook Developer's Garage at the Tempe Center for the Arts. I was surprised at the turnout, but disappointed to see that only a fraction of those in attendance were developers. I got to hear Dave Morin from Facebook speak about "harnessing the power of the social graph" by using the Facebook platform. Erica took some good notes, which she has already posted on her blog.

Back in July I launched my first Facebook app, which provides users with a profile box that displays their myspace photo and links their friends to their myspace profile, and I'm proud to say it has over 2700 users! (You can install my app here.) Curtis, Matt, and I are currently working on another application for Facebook that we hope to unveil sometime in the very near future. Stay tuned!