I live in Utrecht, a city where it seems the municipality tries to annoy car drivers as much as possible. Public transport isn’t an option, even despite the traffic jams it’s slower, less reliable and don’t get me started on the attitude of bus drivers. When you want to travel from one place in Utrecht to another it’s often a good idea to find the nearest highway, it might be much longer, but often much quicker. Instead of complaining (which will stop now ) there might be a solution. I have a theory that a trip is much faster when you avoid traffic lights and use the highway as much as possible. To prove that theory, test my new (Android 2.2) phone, fresh up my Scala knowledge and have a cool pet project I started logging my trips.

In this article I will show you how to collect the data, parse and convert it to a usable format and show it on a map. This is just a first prototype and proving my theory will probably take a lot more time which I don’t have because I’m in traffic jams all the time .
If you don’t like all the technical mumbo jumbo, just scroll to the maps, they’re cool to look at.
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Tags: geotools, GIS, openstreetmap, qgis, Scala
Filed under Java | 3 Comments »

What is it about waterfall we want to avoid ?   It’s mostly the transition moments !   A lot of information is simply lost when you transfer it from one person to another.  Another thing we want to avoid is to create a strict order in things because this leads to limiting flexibility.  Still, Sprint Zero, is a commonly used practice, and it implies to happen before anything else right ?

So how to do a Sprint 0 in a smart way ?  Use these principles :

• A length of more than 1 week for Sprint Zero is way too long
• Spending half of Sprint Zero on training and teambuilding is only nearly enough
• To do more than strictly needed to start the first sprint is too much
• The outcome of Sprint Zero is a jump start for Sprint One.

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Filed under Agile, General, Scrum | 4 Comments »