Agile Complexification Inverter

I ran across the geekiest CAPTCHA on Adafruit Industrials blog.  Thought I'd share. CAPTCHA an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.  A good article on the invention in 2000 of some of the fist. For me, just seeing a resistor brings back a rhyme from 9th grade electronic class that runs in my head uncontrollably. B ad b oys r ape o ur y oung g irls b ut V iolet g ives w illingly A mnemonic for the resistor color code that matches the first letter of the color code, by order of increasing magnitude.

a vending machine - random books One simple initiative each Agile Transformation can make is to create a book lending library focused on Agile processes, organizational change, learning organizations, best engineering practices in software development and other topics.  Since this topic of "what books would you recommend" comes up quite a lot, perhaps it is time for me to join the ranks of hundreds of people making their top 10 Agile books list. Top 100 Agile Books (Edition 2012) by Jurgen Appelo But no that's not what this post will be.  It is something much more useful.  Instructions on creating your very own lending library. Get funding - about $1000 for the first quarter. Find a book shelf and a reading room with comfortable chairs. Purchase 3 copies of each book on the short list - these books are the seed stock. Make a company logo sticker for the back of each book and inside cover. Make signs and hall way posters to advertise your new library. Make a...

I have always wanted a Canon Pro Lens, one of those white and black lens that sets the serious photographer apart from the amateur.  A few years ago I rented one for an Alaska cruise we did.  Hoping to get images of big horn sheep or bear - something one typically needs a long lens to capture. In actual practice the people with the regular lens got as good of images as I did with the super fast long lens.  Why - because they could find the target faster with the wider angle.  When I started thinking about this, it made me question the need for a 35 mm camera.  Would a typical point and shoot give me just as good vacation photos for the scrap book or slide show? I tested this primise out on a European vacation.  I carried the pocket sized point and shoot Canon Power Shot SD1100 IS (8 Mpix with image stabilization).  While my wife carried a Canon 20D (35mm with various lens).  We shot many of the same scenes and typical tourist images, and while...

Technical Debt The software term "technical debt" is getting a lot of play on the air waves.  But I do not think we are using it the way Ward was when he invented the term (a metaphor) to explain to his buisiness team why creating software fast to get feedback was a good thing.  But that they had to be willing and able to sustain a pace of repayment on the debt of doing just good enough design to get product feedback.  Their form of repayment was constant refactoring.  Always keeping the software model moving toward the best possible business model, which modeled the real world.  Using many XP practices to enable the repayment plan of the debt they were consciously assuming. In this vain, technical debt does not cover the process of writing bad code, of poor design, of skipping steps (such as testing).  Those behaviors would be considered to be incompetent design and implementation.  That behavior results not in debt at all but a breach of the in...