I used to be a big fan of tools. I still am…..but not as big a fan as I used to be. This changed after I realized the meaning of ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. Especially the “interactions over tools” part. This week’s blog Eat your failure cake! Learn from your mistakes. motivated me to share one of my failure cakes with you.
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I used to be a big fan of tools. I still am…..but not as big a fan as I used to be. This changed after I realized the meaning of ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. Especially the “interactions over tools” part. This week’s blog Eat your failure cake! Learn from your mistakes. motivated me to share one of my failure cakes with you.
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In this tutorial we are going to create a PageRanking for Wikipedia with the use of Hadoop. This was a good hands-on excercise to get started with Hadoop. The page ranking is not a new thing, but a suitable usecase and way cooler than a word counter! The Wikipedia (en) has 3.7M articles at the moment and is still growing. Each article has many links to other articles. With those incomming and outgoing links we can determine which page is more important than others, which basically is what PageRanking does.
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Running a great session at the ALE2011 conference last week gave me a great level of energy. Facilitating a story mapping session gave me a great boost of confidence. Running a similar session in a different context with a different group toke that confidence away. By eating my failure cake I was able to celebrate my failing and opened my eye to enable me to learn from the failure.

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In Agile methods focus on short feedback cycles and regular delivery of (business) value. Both are supported by having short lead times. Kanban is one of the tools to manage the flow of tasks and reduce lead times.
This article shows how to reduce lead times even further.

One of the mechanisms in Kanban to manage flow is to explicitly set a limit on the amount of work in progress for a process step. By modifying this to include part of the next process step, this article shows that the amount of work in progress is limited more and therefore also lead times are reduced.
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Wouldn’t it be sweet if your whole life were perfect? Your wife would fulfill your every wish. Your children would be perfect examples of responsible happy people growing up. At work your colleagues are the nicest people and working with them is always fun. Your team would feel responsible for every action they (proactively) take and the software systems you produce and maintain are flawless and run like well oiled machines?…

You need to wake up! Nothing will ever be perfect and Agile knows it!
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Agile companies that want to create real ownership, have to say goodbye to traditional stakeholdership and embrace “joint company stakeholdership”. Remain to be an old-skool stakeholder in an agile environment and you will possibly act as a “stakekeeper” instead of a “stakesharer”, therefore withholding the company “staketakers” from focus on value and real ownership of results.
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In two previous posts, we have seen how to develop RESTful application with JBoss AS 7. At the end of the second blog we used a generic REST client tool to execute some RESTful web services. Of course we would rather build a custom UI application as client for our services, so that a user can easily access and manipulate the data. In this blog we build a REST client that is based on the master-detail principle.
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With everybody going mobile, we could not stay behind. This meant we had to create an Android application, because we (Bram Neijt, Arno den Hond and your chronicler) do not own one of them fancy iPhones.
Also, Android is way cooler.
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