agile

Kanban Elevator Pitch

My elevator pitch for kanban would be along the following lines..

“Kanban is a way to incrementally and continually improve your approach to meeting your goals, by understanding the situation clearly, identifying the real challenges and testing out your chosen options for resolving those challenges.”

As with everything Lean and Agile, this elevator pitch will most likely evolve and can be made more specific depending on different audiences, but I am fairly happy with this general pitch.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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events

Summary of LJC February 2011 Social

I had a great time at the social event for the London Java community, which also had people visiting from the Graduate Developer, London Python, London Clojure, London Scala, Limited WIP society and Ubuntu-UK communities.

A write up of some of my experiences that fateful evening are on the London Java Community blog.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket
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book-reviews

Inkscape Essentials for Web Designers

Inkscape is an open source 2D drawing tool that helps you create graphic designs, from simple buttons and logos to full blown posters and web page designs. Inkscape is similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and gives you a vector based graphics tool that uses the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Inkscape is easy to use, although learning the tricks that make designing a web site look great are more involved. Here is a book review for a new book about Inkscape.

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London Developer Events Round Up - Monday 31st January 2011

Events coming up

The GDC are running our first “tooling up” event this year at University College London on the evening of 14th March. I will be discussing the differences between Subversion and Git (Mercurial, Bazaar) and helping graduates understand the choices they have and some of the implications of that choice.

Attendees have the opportunity to follow along as I show you how you can easily use free online repositories (Git, Subversion, Mercurial) for your projects to share your code with others.

I will also cover how version control fits in to and is affected by an agile software development approach. Hope to see you there and bring your laptop (or pair up on the night) if you want to follow along.

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dev-tools

Creating a New Project for the London Scala Coding Dojo

On the third Thursday of the month the London Scala user group runs a Scala coding dojo at Thoughtworks office. The event has a great atmosphere and is a really fun and friendly place to learn and practice the Scala programming language (and some TDD / BDD).

For the Scala coding dojo I use the Simple Build Tool (SBT) to create a new scala project as well as run the building and testing of that project during the dojo.

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ubuntu

Getting Creative - Creating a Wanted Poster

I help organise a monthly social for the London Java Community and am always on the lookout for way to get our members talking.  One of the ways we do this at the social events is to have greeters, to help our new (to the event) members find people who know about the things they are interested in.

In a moment of creativeness, I also thought about having posters on the wall of the social event, so people can see what other members are interested in talking about.  I thought of kind of a rogues gallery, which kind of lead onto the idea of a western style wanted poster.

Using my favourite open source graphic design toolkit (MyPaint & Gimp on Ubuntu) I created the a western style wanted poster of myself.

I initially drew the poster in MyPaint and saved the concept as a portable network graphics (PNG) file.

I export the mypaint drawing using the transparent background.

Opening the concept drawing in Gimp, I cropped the size of the poster to what seemed to be the right dimensions, then added a suitably (less than happy) mugshot of myself.

I wanted to have a paper feel to the poster and make it raggedy too, so it looked like the poster had been around for a while (as have I). I filled in the background of the poster with a medium dark brown colour, with a little bit of opacity, filling in any gaps in the text that the fill tool missed.

Using the FX-Foundry filters in the Gimp, I used the Texturizer (FX-Foundary > Selection Effects > Texturizer) to apply a paper pattern.  Then I added Berchovic Lomo effect (FX-Foundary > Photo > Effects > Berchovic Lomo) to give a glowing boarder to the poster.  This made the poster a little too orange around the boarder, so I also applied a Gothic Glow on top (FX-Foundary > Light and Shadow > Gothic Glow).

To add some finishing touches to the poster, I saved it in Gimp again as a PNG file and opened the poster in MyPaint.  Using the Ink Eraser tool I made the edges look like they has warn away and placed a few holes in the poster.  Using a charcoal tool, I coloured around the edges of the holes I made to give them a wear and tear or burnt feel to them.

To finish off I used the spray tool to add a little more ageing to the poster in general and saved the poster.  Opening the poster back in Gimp one last time to check the poster is nicely cropped and the poster is done.

From idea to finished poster took about 45 minutes, some of which was deciding what to write on the poster in the first place.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket
Creative Commons License