By the time I’ve had my coffee and gotten around to publishing this in the morning, your social media will already be awash in a sea of jingoism and glittery gifs. People will be asking, “where were you on September 11th, 2001?”
And everyone will be furiously pounding at their keyboards, answering the same question they’ve been answering for nineteen years, now. …
Recently, we all saw Alyson McClaran’s iconic photograph of a nurse in Colorado standing vigilant against individuals in a pickup truck protesting the state’s social distancing measures in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
It was the ultimate visualization of similar situations around the country, as small but vocal crowds gathered at city capitols and hospitals to protest business, school, and public park closings. On the other side, healthcare experts insist that so-called “quarantine” measures are necessary: by isolating each other as much as possible, we can slow down the rate of contagion and spread out cases over a longer period…
Or, A Conversation With a Man Who Tried and Failed to Buy My Property By Randomly Texting and Calling Me
Recently, a man named Chris started texting me out of nowhere trying to buy property. I thought he was a bot at first, and I was bored, so I decided to mess with the bot, and see where it went.
Turns out it wasn’t a bot. It was Chris. This is what transpired.
Recipe
- 2 parts Bourbon
- 1 part Brandy
- Squeeze of an orange wedge
( go nuts, use a clementine ) - Dash of simple syrup
( maintain eye contact with any haters as you stir it in ) - Serve over ice, and garnish with a small orange peel
( or twist of orange if you’re unapologetically fancy )
History
There it is, my New Fashioned recipe. See, what had happened was, I had to take the day off from work to deal with having my stairs replaced. It involved my input a lot more than I expected. …
Understand the oft-misunderstood, and gain power in the process
If your team is operating within some flavor of Scrum, it is likely wrestling with the concept of story points. The Scrum Guide instructs teams to use some quantifiable means of estimating the complexity, difficulty, or effort involved in completing a story — and so, teams settle on some arbitrary point scale.
At face value, the concept appears to be fraught with problems. It’s generally agreed-upon that complexity increases according to the Fibonacci Sequence, and so that is the most common scale for story points; while the reasoning makes sense, the…
So you want to develop software products? Let’s start from scratch — the very beginning, a beautiful, untouched green field, ripe for planting the seeds of success.
The Product Development Team: Everything Flows from Here
First things first, you’re going to need Product Development Team.
Already, you’ve already made three very critical choices:
- You are building a team.
- Your team develops.
- Your team develops products.
The Three Perspectives
As it turns out, these are also the three critical perspectives that must be maintained if you want to be an effective product development team: the Process or Project Perspective, the Technical Perspective, and the User Perspective. …
I was invited by the University of Texas at Arlington to participate in a Career Readiness Panel, in association with the Lockheed Martin Career Development Center, in March of 2019. This was my first ever time participating as a panelist for anything — but not my first time engaging with bright young minds as they seek to begin their careers.
On the panel with me were representatives from a broad array of fields, including legal, human resources, filmmaking, and industrial engineering. I was representing rewardStyle as a software development professional. …
- It’s Fireball
If you’re not willing to fight and suffer for what you believe, what’s the point?
Two things have been rattling around in my brain for a while, and I haven’t really had the time to sit and suss them out. They are related, and they’ve been troubling me.
First, I’ve been told that my political posts on social media are at best annoying, and at worst nothing but an eternal torrent of noise begging to be muted and ignored forever. I can totally understand that — I have been posting a lot of political things on social media. Our political climate is incredibly partisan, and everyone sticks to their own bubbles of influence, so they…
I started attending Hebrew school and Sunday school, separately, in the third grade. I lived literally on the other side of town, and was never particularly fond of the vast majority of my classmates or instructors in either class, so, once I mastered the ability to read and write Hebrew, I quickly lost interest. I’d use every excuse to get out of going. After I became a Bar Mitzvah towards the end of the seventh grade, there was no longer any real reason for me to continue attending if I didn’t want to.
But one of the last times I…
Brian Shef
Father, geek, software development professional
