So again, the #altnetseattle Conference easily was one of the most useful events of the year for me. The amount of ideas, thoughts, and conversations that happen in just those two days often outweigh all the presentations I see at other conferences throughout the year. The reason is simple, they are directed, to the point,... Continue reading →

The first two sessions on Sunday were Collaboration and why it is so hard and the following, which was a perfect following session was on Kanban. While in that second session two online Saas Style Tools were mentioned; AgileZen and Leankit. I decided right then and there that I would throw together some first impressions... Continue reading →

The two main concepts of Kanban is to keep the queues minimum and to maintain visibility. Management/leadership needs to make sure the Kanban Queue doesn?t get starved. This is key and also very challenging, being the queue needs to be minimal but also can?t get too small during the course of work. This is to... Continue reading →

The session convened and we began a discussion about why collaboration is so hard. To work together in software better us engineers have to overcome traditional software approaches (silos of work) and the human element of tending to go off in a corner to work through an issue. It was agreed upon that software engineers... Continue reading →

I dived into the MEF session with Glenn Block, Sourabh Mathur, Brian Henderson, and others. Glenn covered the basic architectural ideas of MEF and then dived into a few examples. Is a framework around decoupling components. Built around the idea of discoverable type systems. Traditional extensibility mechanisms have a host and the respective extensions, commonly... Continue reading →