Eventyr

Positive Experience Questions

• What’s been your best experience working at this company?
• When do you have the most fun at work ?
• Who do you enjoy working with the most here? What do you like about them?
• Which manager do you admire the most in this company? What do you admire about that person?
• What’s the greatest thing your manager has done for his/her people?

Questions to ask in interviews (Via Tom Nixon)

Coding Dojo 11

The eleventh Code Dojo (my, this is starting to look well established!) was on 26th March at the FP Offices.  We continued Kata Four (Data Munging) in Java - looking at the second part of the Kata. 

It was good to have some new people attending (PiersCawley, GrahamCarlyle and MakotoInoue) and they helped instigate a lot of interesting conversation at this session about ways to address problems, Test-Driven Development, Up-Front problem discussion (as opposed to solving), refactoring, the limitations of Java, and applications of Agile. 

I almost wish I had taken notes. 

(Thankfully the session was recorded so I can just watch the video again at another time should I choose.)

As Dom puts it: "I learned an enormous amount from the interaction this evening. [...] Chatting  afterwards made me realise how I tend to be very focussed on solving the problem at hand rather than stepping back and trying to create something beautiful."

Filling in the Gaps

Just as I am having a hard time filling the gaps in on my ethnographic data I am finding my posting has slowed. 

There was a long list of things I needed to post here - and this has been my task for the day.  Good for me, but should anyone subscribe to this (gawd forbid) then they may feel a bit inundated.

So sorry, but I am about to post loads and backdate even more.

Rehired

I wonder if I am too nice in allowing my old employers to recontract me for five hours a week (of which I am expected to work four).  They seemed to miss me.   

I should have suggested they find an administrator instead as anyone can do the work - editing security protocols transcripts in LaTeX for publication by Springer is fairly mindless work - and I fear I will prioritise them badly.

But then, I am a student still, and I need the pennies.  It is all about the pennies really.

Revisiting Agile Fun

Ran another Agile Fun session for the folks at FP at the Pitcher and Piano - this time on office space. 

It was interesting to see what people came out with as the main features of an office to be developed.  I wasn't convinced by the idea of a giant fax machine in the middle of the office that would get in everyone's way, but that was what the customer requested.

I think a different venue to the Pitcher and Piano may need to be found.  The table, and table service, is spot on but the noise levels can be problematic - and would cause problems for me explaining some concepts to novices.

More photos here.

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I have since received my packs of XP Playing Cards in the post, which I hope to put into practice soon.

Agile Certification

While it might be nice that an employee has been trained in an agile practice, or has read books, nothing beats the experience gained by working on a team and learning for yourself. making mistakes, enjoying successes, and facing both with equanimity and humility.

Jon Kern on the Agile Alliance's position on Agile Certification

Typing to Stereotyping

But there’s one thing that keeps them at arm’s length: “The researcher,” “The Sysadmin,” “The OSS Developer,” “The CS Student.” It is common practice for personas to be given these kinds of user type labels but that practice diminishes our ability to empathize.

It might seem like a small thing, but the moment these folks are typed they become members of a class, and their identities are now of being in those groups — and you start referring to that persona as “the Sysadmin” and not “Donald.” It doesn’t take much to go from typing to stereotyping–”Sysadmins want these kinds of features”–and once that happens, empathy is lost.

A little thing about personas (Via Tom)

On Biting the Heads from Chickens

Further to the Argus article about the Brighton Girl Geek Dinners we were invited to talk on BBC Southern Counties.  Interesting experience. 

I will not forget being told that a geek is a performer who likes to bite the heads from chickens.  I think we did ok for ourselves.

My father kindly recorded the session for me - onto audio cassette, a medium I have not used in a long, long time.  Old with the new.

Amnesia

To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones.

When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats' memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.

LeDoux's team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process - communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.

Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD will be encouraged by the step forward. "These drugs would be adjuncts to therapy," he says. "This is the future of psychiatry - neuroscience will provide tools to help it become more effective."

Wipe out a single memory

QCon - Post Conference Info

Post conference Info:

QCon wiki

QCon slides
QCon Flickr Pool

Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon 2007 - summary article based on blog posts about QCon, nice to be quoted.