What Fox Entertainment’s Glee Taught Me About Agile and the Power of Team Ownership

by Zachary August 28, 2009

I was watching Fox Entertainment’s new show Glee on Hulu and was struck by an interesting correlation between the plot and a core tenant of effective agile teams. In Glee a teacher discovers that the glee club is about do be disbanded and decides to take responsibility for it’s continued development. This is no small [...]

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Parsing Recurring Time Patterns in Natural Language with Daniel Parker @dcparker at @barcampgr

by Zachary August 24, 2009

This is the second of Daniels talks, at least out of those that I heard. In this one Daniel talks about parsing through natural language to get computer readable time patterns. Basically taking something like “July third from 3 to 5 AM and Aug 12th at 3PM” and translating them into something your computer can [...]

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Fuzzy String Matching with Daniel Parker @dcparker at @barcampgr

by Zachary August 24, 2009

Daniel Parker of BehindLogic had an amazing set of talks. This is his explanation of how to do a fuzzy logic string search. He actually wrote out a JavaScript implementation and tossed it up on github. Basically it’s a similar implementation to how QuickSilver works.

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Continous Integration with Aaron Day @crazydaysorg @barcamp

by Zachary August 22, 2009

Aaron Day (@crazydaysorg) had an enlightening talk about Continous Integration. I wish I had his slides I do! Check them out on the BarcampGr Wiki, because they’re pretty dang good. He covered everything from automated builds, to integration testing, to building docs with your build.
Continuous integration is a development practice where the development team regularly [...]

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Fun with jQuery UI with @kswedberg @barcampgr

by Zachary August 22, 2009

Karl Swedberg (@kswedberg) had an awesome presentation on jqueryUI and took ous on a whirlwind tour of the different features it has available. Definitely worth a look through.
Hi, I’m just going to talk about JQuery UI. I thought it would be fun to show you some flash G-Whiz sort of things. I just finished teaching [...]

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Transcript from @barcampgr: People and Ideas (What I learned spending three months brainstorming)

by Zachary August 22, 2009

This was a presentation by Jason Porritt. He has  a website JasonPorritt.com. Forgive the many typos that this will have . Transcribed it on the fly again!
The first thing I learned was that you don’t throw away ideas…
Along that same line when you’re brainstorming I discovered you have to build up a lot of [...]

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Rebuild the Owosso Theater by Sponsoring Me in a 5K Run

by Zachary July 6, 2009

I try to avoid doing these requests for donations and that kind of thing, it makes me feel a little dirty. However, what I’m asking for now is something that is near and dear to my heart.
For the past year I’ve been fairly active with the Owosso Community Players. I’ve done three shows in a [...]

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Passive Feedback: Observing Actions to Inform Decisions

by Zachary July 1, 2009

I recently published an article called Active Feedback: Requesting Feedback To Meet Needs. This article is a companion article talking about a more objective form of feedback: Passive Feedback. While active feedback is great for involving people in the product development process, passive feedback should be used to validate ideas, assumptions or guesses that have [...]

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Active feedback: Requesting Feedback To Meet Needs

by Zachary May 30, 2009

There are two ways to gather feedback. You can either request feedback, which is active feedback; or you can observe what people do, passive feedback. Active and passive feedback are most useful in different situations. They have their own sets of pros and cons. However, both must be applied to make a truly informed decision.

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Personal Timeboxing: A Method for Fighting Procrastination and Perfectionism

by Zachary May 25, 2009

We’ve all been there. We have a huge list of things we need to do, and we just don’t get around to it. Maybe we spent too much time on the first thing, or maybe we simply diddled away the time frolicking about theIntertubes discovering the latest in speed reading techniques. Either way, our [...]

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