October 24, 2010
Part 4: Constant evaluation and improvement: Finding sources for feedback. # In recent years demand for shorter feedback cycles especially in software development has increased. Agile development, lean management and even Scrum are all for short feedback cycles: Coming from the dark ages when software projects would last for months or even years before any results could be delivered to customers we are transforming development into a process that integrates the customer in the design and evolution of his own product.
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October 14, 2010
Salsa steps # If you always wanted to start learning Salsa and never really had the time to do so: Today a new beginners’ course starts at Salsa Con Corazon in Berlin Schöneberg. The course is still open for registration teaching the very basics in four sessions - one per week.
October 6, 2010
A Get Together Checklist # Still on the list of potentially interesting books: The Checklist Manifesto - explaining why checklists can still be valuable - especially for complex problems and tasks.
Though not very complex, I chose to come up with a checklist for running a Hadoop Get Together in Berlin as an exercise. I’m trying to stick with advise provided by the Checklist for Checklists.
Parties involved
Find two to three speakers two months in advance.
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September 24, 2010
Are devs contributing to OSS happier? # When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers’ conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free?
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September 7, 2010
Part 3: A polite way to say no - and why there are times when it does not work. # After having shared my thoughts on how to improve focus and how to track tasks eating up time this post will explain how to keep time invested at a more or less constant level. The goal of this exercise is to keep obligations at a reasonable level - be it at work or during ones spare time.
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September 3, 2010
Part 2: Tracking tasks, or - Where the hack did my time go to last week? # After summarising some strategies for not loosing track of tasks, meetings and conferences in the last post, this one is going to focus on the retrospect on achievements. If at some point in time you have asked yourself “Where the hack did time go to?” - maybe after two busy weeks of work this article might have a few techniques for you.
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August 17, 2010
Apache Dinner DUS # the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined “FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*” takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn’t rain, we’ll be sitting outside.
Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular.
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August 11, 2010
NoSQL summer Berlin - this evening # This evening at Volkspark Friedrichshain, Café Schoenbrunn the next NoSQL summer Berlin (organised by Tim Lossen) is meeting to discuss the paper on Amazon’s Dynamo “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store”. The group is planning to meet at 19:30 for some beer and discussions on the publication.
August 3, 2010
Part 1: Travelling minds # In the last post I promised to share some more information on techniques I came across and found useful under an increasing work load. Instead of taking a close look at my professional calendar I decided to use my private one as an example - first because spare time is even more precious then working hours, simply because there is so few of it and secondly because I am free to publicly scrutinize not only the methods for keeping it in good shape but also the entries in it.
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July 30, 2010
Series: Getting things done # Probably not too unusual for people working on free software mostly (though no longer exclusively) in their spare time, the number of items that appear in my private calendar have increased steadily in the past months and years:
Every three months I am organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin.
I have been asked (and accepted the offer) to publish articles on Hadoop and Lucene in magazines.
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