Our team contains experienced rails developers who pair program, extensively test and deploy predictably on a weekly iteration cycle. We emphasize work/life balance, sustainable pace and collaborative feature development in a collegial environment.

Work entails creating and maintaining Ruby on Rails websites and other consumer digital products for Simon & Schuster, a leading English Language trade publisher. Position reports directly to VP Engineering for Simon & Schuster Digital. Simon & Schuster is a women-run organization, an equal opportunity employer and a part of CBS Corporation.

We mostly code in Ruby on Rails 3, Bootstrap, Sass, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, CSS, HTML with RSpec, Jasmine testing.

Join a good team. Get a full-time job with benefits. Help us figure out the future of trade publishing. Gain access to Simon & Schuster’s thousands of books through our employee physical and ebook programs.

See the full posting at http://smsch.us/Xeq9JH

No recruiters please.

Is scheduled Thursday August 16, 2012 9:00am – 10:30am @ Austin 4-6

This session is in the Leadership track but it’s leadership with a lowercase “l”. Not Innovation and Intrepreneurship — as valuable as they are — but day to day individual integrity.

It is about what we as practitioners should do and the workplaces we should strive to create around us.

It is about how our embrace of Agile development informs our values and provides us tools to make change happen.

Here’s what I hope attendees come away with:

• Awareness of research establishing the shortage of women developers and the material and cultural factors that contribute to it.
• Agreement that a way of working that discourages women from entering our field and drives them out mid-career is not a collaborative, effective, agile way of working.
• Belief that agile practice provides a value system and tools that can help us change our workplace to be more tolerant, humane, and creative.
• Optimism that we as individual workers can do more than we think to make this happen.

Here’s the outline I’ve worked out:

• Presentation: the shortage of women developers (15 min.)
• Table discussion: what antigens exist in your workplace? (20-25 min.)
• Presentation: agile principles demand we address the shortage of women developers (15 min.)
• Table discussion: how is your current agile practice failing to address this impediment (20-25 min.)
• Presentation: change your team to change the world? (5 min.)

public function display_header() {
		if ( $this->share_type == 'share' ) {
			// Set the open graph description, otherwise Facebook may pick up some random text from the page
			global $post;
			
			if ( $post && $post->ID > 0 )
				echo '<meta property="og:description" content="'.esc_attr( apply_filters( 'sharing_post_title', $post->post_title, $post->ID, $this->id ) ).'" />';
		}
	}

Source in wordpress trak.

Problem is I’d rather define my og tags or rely on a plugin focused on doing this well.

There are several plugins to do open graph tag insertion that do a better job. You may want to roll your own directly into your theme or using one of the general SEO plugins.

So, I want to remove these extraneous tags. Online tips suggest I go into each plugin and comment out the php code inserting these tags. That’s a direct option but I hate modifying plugins. I don’t want to maintain these hacks through updates.

So, I solved with javascript. The approach is a hack. It requires that sharedaddy and other plugins insert their og:description tags before the tags I want to preserve and that I start my desired facebook tags with an fb:admins tag.

function removeExtraOpenGraphMetaTags()
{
	//assumes extra og tags occur before an fb:admins
	var first_og_tag = jQuery("meta[property]").first();
        //if the first meta tag with a property attribute is fb:admins - do nothing
	if (jQuery("meta[property]").first().attr('property') != 'fb:admins') 
	{
		//remove all subsequent og tags until fb:admins
		var removed_tags = first_og_tag.nextUntil("meta[property='fb:admins']", "meta[property*='og:']").remove();
		if (removed_tags) { first_og_tag.remove(); }
	}
}

By achieving this, you evidence rare concern to improve the work life of peers and improve their work products in ways your organization may not yet appreciate.

But having articulated a problem, you will often find no clear solution or an answer that is obvious but painful.

So you look to others for advice: peers, coaches, and thought leaders.

Don’t be surprised if the advice is unsatisfying. But this is no surprise.

Your challenges may look like a thousand examples but they are uniquely your own. At their root, they source from the people who make up your organization. People with a unique set of preconceptions, decisions, and values systems.

More essentially, you are a unique set of experiences, relationships, strengths and weaknesses and you are the essential agent for tackling this problem.

Be wary of any advice that doesn’t acknowledge this — that fails a test of respect and humility. No outside expert truly understands your situation or is deeply invested in solving it for you.

The best you can come away with is things to try, things to research, new questions to ask, analogies, fellowship and most importantly hope to persevere.

A worthy coach or advisor must approach your situation with patience and empathy. Listen and question as much as advise. Not fill the void of an answer with tangential descriptions of practice. Not pretend an answer that celebrates their abilities more than embraces your circumstances, “What you need to do…”

If you get the sense the coach or advisor is failing to listen or speaking more out of their own needs. Gleen what you can. Thank them. Move on.

But keep trying.

Don’t let the failings of the people in our community discourage you or diminish you. They are just peers with a different context. They are human too. And they are not you.

Presentation notes: http://khj.me/KLKm0u

Judy, K.H.; , “Agile Values, Innovation and the Shortage of Women Software Developers,” System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on , vol., no., pp.5279-5288, 4-7 Jan. 2012

doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2012.92

Abstract: The percentage of women software developers in the U.S. has declined from 42% in 1987 to less than 25% today. This is in a software/internet marketplace where women are online in equal numbers to men, directly or indirectly influence 61% of consumer electronics purchases, generate 58% of online dollars, and represent 42% of active gamers. Women avoid careers in software due to hostile environments, unsustainable pace, diminished sense of purpose, disadvantages in pay, and lack of advancement, peers or mentors. Agile Software Development is founded upon values that challenge such dysfunction in order to build self-organizing, collaborative and highly productive teams. In a high functioning Agile practice, developers engage each other, product owners and sponsors in a shared concern for quality, predictability and meeting the needs of end users. Can Agile values and practice drive changes in the workplace to better attract and retain women software developers?

URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6149534&isnumber=6148595

Our work anticipated the change in the Scrum Guide to consider the product owner as part of the team.

We developed an original windows software application using Scrum/XP with an onsite product owner and UX designer.

We evolved the product experience validating our assumptions using user personas and both informal and formal usability testing.

We released the product as a free Beta by the time of this presentation in 2007 and were working to build a customer base.

The lifecycle of a company (and the larger economy) doesn’t play nice with hopes and intentions. Oxygen was acquired by NBC-Universal before we were able to validate our assumptions.

doi: 10.1109/AGILE.2007.49

I am a possible customer who embraces agile principles, practices agile techniques and has done so for years.

I admire the tenacity and talent it takes to build a business in consulting.

The best of you offer your clients techniques, language and a way of thinking that can better lives and turn around companies: advising them in ways to change their own organizations, bolstering their courage to experiment, helping them learn to iteratively learn, inspiring them to foster teams, empower individual contributors, incrementally improve, and helping them grow past dependency on your services.

Here’s how I judge whether a thought leader is a worthy mentor:

• Your reputation among those of your peers I know and respect.
• Do you provide context/share credit: “This is where it originated, this is who popularized or researched it, this is who’s written well on it. This is my version of it.”
• Do you espouse principles: “This is about defining work that builds equity because it offers real benefit to end users and a way of working that entrusts individual contributors of diverse talents to collaborate within teams to deliver that benefit.”
• Are you frank: “Most companies who try this fail. Most managers who try this will not change their own behavior enough to allow their teams to succeed for them.”
• Do you embody the principles: “It is about your team(s). Not me. I do not have right answers only experience, a willingness to listen, and techniques to help us figure out what you need to do to help yourselves.”

Conversely, these are the bad smells:

• Celebrating the widespread adoption of “Agile” without acknowledging most “agile” adoptions are crap.
• Celebrating scale not individual team excellence.
• Focusing on techniques not principles as if “stories” and “iterations” were magic.
• Talking about software tools before disciplined engineering practice.
• Talking about “value” and “productivity” as if a leader’s understanding of these terms were not a/the major obstacle to their workers ability to perform.
• Jamming agile practices into a contradictory way of thinking: “Agile process manager” anyone?
• Coining new jargon for a slight spin on existing practices: It looks like a timebox, smells like a timebox, tastes like a timebox. “I call it creato-inno-rations™.”
• Putting yourself above the problem: Just because you were really good when you practiced doesn’t mean you are a brilliant coach. Just because you’re a brilliant coach doesn’t mean you can do my job better than me. Just because you can do my job better than me doesn’t mean paying you to not do my job provides my company value.
• Overheated claims of personal invention/Not giving credit to others. Sorry guys (and I mean guys), Mary Poppendieck was talking kanban and software development fifteen years ago. You’ve advanced the craft, you’re changing minds, and you may be very good at what you do but you are not Archimedes.

As a potential customer, I need your honest criticism, I am impressed by your ability to learn from others. I respect determination and humility more than bravado.

Give credit where credit is due and do exceptionally well.

I use jetpack so I wanted to use the provided sharedaddy module.

The google plus button is a new addition and displays the medium button with default annotation.

I don’t have the traffic to display annotations. I want to use the small button.

So per google’s docs, I edited the sharing-sources.php file

from

public function get_display( $post ) {
		return '<div class="googleplus1_button"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" data-callback="sharing_plusone" data-href="' . esc_attr( get_permalink( $post->ID ) ) . '"></div></div>';
	}

to

public function get_display( $post ) {
		return '<div class="googleplus1_button"><div class="g-plusone" data-size="small" data-annotation="none" data-callback="sharing_plusone" data-href="' . esc_attr( get_permalink( $post->ID ) ) . '"></div></div>';
	}

Better approach

Of course, the above hack reverted the next time I updated jetpack. So, I did this in javascript instead:

function removeCountsFromGooglePlus()
{
	if (jQuery('.googleplus1_button iframe'))
	{
                jQuery('.googleplus1_button iframe').attr("src", jQuery('.googleplus1_button iframe').attr("src").replace(/size=/,"annotation=none&size="));
	}
}

Note: (9/2012) Google updated their api to change from count=false to annotation=none. Snipped above updated to reflect this…

jQuery(‘.googleplus1_button iframe’).attr(“src”, jQuery(‘.googleplus1_button iframe’).attr(“src”).replace(/count=true/,”count=false”));

Successful movements take on a cloying “fill me with your knowledge” cast. A perpetual newbie state where new adherents come on faster than existing practitioners have opportunity to develop experience and wisdom.

I really don’t need to have another conversation about how to phrase the first sentence of a user story.

And I definitely feel some of the same heat rising from the attention to lean. Buzz, buzz, kanban, buzz…

But can we blame the thought leaders, the coaches, the industry deriving wealth from a movement for the failings of that movement? Is it the corrupting influence of success or rather broad adoption itself?

I think the latter.

First, let me acknowledge that iterative improvement is a lengthy process and has to start somewhere. That your current state is entirely flawed is a given.

You don’t have to be excellent at what you do at this exact moment to begin improving your own practice and your workplace. A broad swath of not soul killing workplaces is at least as valuable as a small set of shining cities on the hill.

But whatever the starting point, taking on agile practice is dedicating yourself to a mission of fundamentally changing the nature of our work to something both disciplined and highly accountable but also collaborative, creative and sustainable.

And broad adoption means that a lot of people who call themselves “agile” just don’t rise up or even aspire to rise up to that mission.

If you claim you’re doing XP: have 24 hour builds, the developers all work solo and your test coverage is 10% then you’re either at the start of a very long journey (which I deeply admire you for) or you’re lying to yourself and you just plain suck.

If you claim you’re doing Scrum and the developers haven’t talked to a business person in months, can’t articulate what your team achieved in the last month, and you require “stabilization” sprints before you can deploy working code, you are either at the start of a very long journey (which, again, I deeply admire you for) or you’re lying to yourself and you just plain suck.

It’s not one of a thousand consultancies, professional coaches, certification tracks, associations or conferences fault if you suck.

It’s not Jeff Sutherland’s or Ken Schwaber’s fault if you suck. As a matter of fact, they and their peers have done a great deal to give a great many of us a chance at sucking less.

The mentor/mentee relationship is powerful but it’s up to each of us to do our work with courage, integrity and passion. It’s up to each of us to hold our peers to a standard of competence and care.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”