Technically, I facilitated a retrospective at a former employer about a year ago, and it was pretty disastrous. The key stakeholders for the product I was working left about halfway through it to take phone calls. Ouch. That’s what I get for not securing the necessary buy-in.

But today it went great. I opened the space by asking permission to perform the retrospective, I made sure everyone’s voice was heard, I did what I could to create a comfortable space for airing concerns. We did a timeline, we looked for patterns, it worked pretty well. It ran quite long though. I had severely underestimated the amount of time necessary. It went for 2 hours, and I feel like we could have gone for another hour easily.

With all that time spent doing some intensive examination, there were 10 minutes that made the entire thing worthwhile: the appreciations. It is something I read about after Olivia recommended the Agile Retrospectives book and instantly fell in love with. Basically you create an open forum in which people can voice ways in which they appreciate team members in a really simple format. E.g., “I appreciate Joe for always taking time out of his day to help me when I am confused.”

It’s powerful. The response I got from the team was amazing, sincere, deep, and elevating. I was blown away.

It resonates really deeply with me, and I think it’s because it so closely echoes something that my father taught me as I was growing up: always let people know you’re thankful for the things they do for you. I urge you to take a moment today and let someone know you appreciate them in some specific way.

The retrospective was a resounding success and for a very specific reason: I work with amazing people. We learned quite a lot, we have a bunch of action items we’re going to focus on, and we’ve got even more things to noodle over until our next “big” retrospective.

Thiggy out.

Today is my first day working at Cheezburger Network, and I am terribly excited. Why am I so excited you ask? Because ultimately my job is to add more pictures of cats to the internet (and pictures of other things I suppose).

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Who knows where we’ll go next.

There’s some cheesy song lyric, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” (which I can’t be bothered to google a proper attribution for) and I just want to touch on what has come to an end: my tenure at Kaseya.

I really enjoyed meeting and working with the people I worked with on a day-to-day basis at Kaseya and wish them the best of luck. There are some very hard-working folks there, and am sure great things are in their future.

So, enough of that! You may have noticed I haven’t blogged since December 2009. I tweet a lot more than I blog, and it’s a great venue for short little bursts of transient dialogue. I’ve got some more thoughtful posts brewing in my google docs I will be posting to, and I hope to get some of those out soon. No promises.

Much Love.

Too bad the support has sucked. My account password was stolen, and the culprit logged in and charged stuff to my stored credit card. Skype was happy to reset my password, but informed me that it was impossible to get a refund on these purely virtual unused goods.

At this point, I called my credit card company, and informed them of the fraud, and they took care of it. Skype didn’t like that very much however and completely disabled the paid functions of my account (which I had used my stored “skype credit” for).

So my business phone number went dark. They didn’t email me about this at all either. I don’t get a lot of traffic on that number so I didn’t even know it wasn’t working.

So that’s where I stand now. I’m on a live chat with a Skype rep trying to get it sorted out.

In the end, I suppose this is run by the same company that runs PayPal, and we all know how they are legendary for their uber-crappy support. I shouldn’t be that surprised.

Lesson of the Day: Don’t trust Skype (or PayPal). I can’t wait for Google Voice.

Update: Annnnd the chat just ended. Andre on the Skype Support Live Chat was way more awesome and helpful than the last person I spoke with @ Skype and actually helped me out. So there’s that.

Still, I’m not planning on using Skype for anything mission critical in the near future.

Everyone talks about all the fancy new WPF stuff, but I’m really excited to be talking about WinForms here. I know that a lot of us are stuck using WinForms for quite a while, and we’ll all be maintaining WinForms apps for the foreseeable future. MVP is something you can apply to your WinForms code and create desktop apps that are testable, flexible, and maintainable. We all want this.

I’m hoping to do a live coding example with a small ToDo application there building the app up and showing how to wire up all the MVP-ness. Visual Studio is currently being uncooperative and it’s currently doing a repair, so we’ll see if that fixes it. Here’s hoping! If not I’ll just do it in MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop. It’s all gravy.

Here are the details:
7-9PM
Olympia Center
222 Columbia NW
Olympia, WA 98501

See you there!

def create_auth_string(username, password):
  import base64
  credentials = base64.encodestring("%s:%s" % (username, password)).rstrip()
  auth_string = 'Basic %s' % credentials
  return auth_string

# create auth string for header
auth_string = create_auth_string("user", "pass")

# This is where the magic happens
response = self.client.get('/url/requiring/authorization/', HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=auth_string)

Not complicated, but not documented anywhere I could find. Enjoy!

All you have to do is hold down alt and use the cursor or select with your mouse to select arbitrary blocks of text. Best day ever.

Visual Studio isn’t terribly discoverable.

And what a day it’s been! I’ve managed to… do a lot of administrative tasks. Wait. What? What’s that you say? You can’t bill for administrative tasks? Yes. Well, I know that.

But since taking on my own clients, a lot of administrative tasks had piled up working full time. My time keeping system consisted of post it notes, and while I had QuickBooks, I hadn’t actually bothered to learn how to create an invoice.

Time keeping software is scary. It’s pretty much a horrible task, so any software you use only makes a horrible task computerized and more horrible. There’s no real winning with time keeping. Nobody has ever said, “Oh man, last night, I got home and I got to record my time! It was so awesome!”

I consulted my OCD friend Lifehacker for reviews of various Time Tracking Softwares. timeEdition seemed relatively popular, so I downloaded it and started transferring all my post it notes of billable hours into it. It seems to be pretty simple which is what I wanted. Select customer, project, and task, click start, work, click stop, and bam, you’re done.

That’s nice, but entering historical hours is pretty painful. A date picker which always defaults to today, and some pretty picky time selection controls makes for rough waters. I persevered, and I think, moving forward, it will work nicely.

Likes: Simple, Easy to Use
Dislikes: Painful Manual Data Entry UX, Doesn’t Store Database in the Cloud

I could rant about QuickBooks sucking, but everyone who uses it already knows that, so I’ll leave it at that. I have nothing new to contribute.

I’m so excited though. I did Administrivia, and I loved it. I’m ready to take over the world! At least as soon as I get this invoice to save to PDF.

I can’t say anything new about paired programming in general that someone else hasn’t already said, but I can say this: it is freaking awesome. Others seem to agree.

I want to talk about my paired programming setup. We tried VNC, but it apparently sucks a lot these days. It was flakey and kept dropping connections. No idea what that was about. It also required all kinds of firewall fiddling I have no love for.

Sean Chambers told me about SharedView and Tokbox on twitter, and while I  haven’t used Tokbox yet, I must say SharedView has rocked my world. It’s so cool! No firewall baloney, you only share what you want to share, and it’d dead simple.

We use Skype for voice communication, which is always clear and well behaved. I love Skype for video chats, too. With a modern webcam, the quality is so amazing.

The combination has worked great, and combined I think we have dramatically reduced the friction of remote operating.

But what to remap it to? So many ideas!

• Visual Studio’s REAL Help System (aka, Google (Yes, not Bing))
• Collapse All in Solution Explorer
• Resharper’s Unit Test Explorer
• Open Firefox and Google For Selected Word
• Find Current Item in Solution Explorer
• Spell Check
• Compile Current Project
• Make Me Coffee (May require Spouse addin)
• My Personal Favorite: ReSharper.UnitTest_RunCurrentSession

Sock it to me now!

Not this time. The payment processor marked my card as fraud for whatever dark reason payment processors do, and the software provided no means of recourse. The excellent customer service representatives were hamstrung by a web application which provided no ability to manage any of these common issues.

It reminded me a great deal of Ayende’s PayPal Post

Anyway, here is the email I sent to logoyes after borrowing my partner’s credit card so I could perform a business transaction:

Thank you [Very Nice Customer Service Rep Name].

As I said on the phone, I had to call several times in order to get this purchase sorted out. The customer service representatives were very kind, patient and helpful. I cannot speak more highly of the customer service representatives employed by logoyes.

However, as a software developer, I feel ashamed that someone in my profession was paid money to write the logoyes.com software. The fact that I can spend quite a bit of time creating a logo and getting approval from a client, only to have the payment processor mess up and not have that logo saved anywhere, or provide the customer service reps with any ability to help me in that situation is ridiculous.

I understand that payment processors are pretty tricky things, but a false positive on fraud is such a common occurence it’s a complete oversight to not have any other way for a customer (which in my case had already invested at least 2 hours into the process) to pay for their logo is incredulous.

I will not be buying another logo from logoyes, which is unfortunate because I’ve been pretty pleased with the results. However, for such a low cost product, I cannot risk investing more hours into the logo and suddenly have no way to download it. It makes no business sense.

Thank you,

James Thigpen