agile

Understanding Can Be Difficult if There Is Confrontation

When trying to share some knowledge or raise issues, I try to lead the audience (audience being an individual, team or community) on a thought trail rather than pointing out issues directly or just imparting the answer. By laying out a path of thinking, the audience is more likely to engage with the concepts or information you are imparting and become involved in path to the answer. Once on the path, the audience is more likely to accept the outcome.

Okay, so how do you start a thought trail, it sounds like a long, drawn out, boring process!

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ubuntu

Creating Posters With Inkscape - Open Source Drawing

I do find it helpful to quickly sketch out what I want the poster to generally look like.  I also found that using separate layers for background images, text boxes and text helped when building up more interesting designs.

Once I’ve created my posters I can save them as a standard Adobe pdf file.  You can of course save them as postscript as well as lots of other formats too.

As the default file format of Inkscape is SVG, you can also view your posters using the Ubuntu Image Viewer or The Gimp.

According to the Inkscape site:

“Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.  There is also a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.“

There is a great online guide to using Inkscape called Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing program which is also available as a book.

There are more features I’d like to learn with Inkscape, to make even better posters, but it shows how good the tool is in that I can be productive so quickly.  Have a look at the Inkscape advanced tutorial for making your posters even more snazzy.

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
agile

The Other Kind of Well-Rounded Developer

For people in software development, a great deal of time is spent working and learning in order to increase the quality of your output and make you a more rounded person. Unfortunately, all this time is spend with your body fairly inactive, leading to another kind of more rounded person that you didn’t plan for, i.e. your body does not get the exercise it wants.

This is a problem for many knowledge worker roles, so here are some things you can do to make you a rounded person in mind and not in body.

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The Khan Academy - Open Source Learning

The Khan Academy is an online learning resource with 1600+ video library and is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month.

This ever growing library allows people to learn at their own pace. As all the content is developed as an open source project, this could mean the Khan Academy becomes the free classroom for the World.

Learn more about the Khan Academy and Salman Khan…

If you use XMBC media centre then there is a video add-on for the Khan Acadamy, so you can stream videos directly to your TV.

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
events

QCon Brainstorming Night

Thanks to the hospitality of the QCon organisers, last nights QCon brainstorming session was a great event. As well as all the great discussions going on, there was a seriously generous helping of really nice food and what seemed a never ending supply of drinks.

QCon is a regular event aimed at those interested and engaged in enterprise software development. The event aims to provide the highest quality presenters and most engaging topics each year. Previously the QCon schedule has been organised from the input of those wishing to present, but for QCon 2011 the goal is to include ideas and recommendations from the community of people who pay to attend QCon when deciding on the schedule.

There was over 30 people that turned up and it was a great atmosphere. I turned up there early (no surprise) with a friend and we were greeted by our very friendly host, Jørn Larsen (on the far right of the picture). Here is what happend that night.

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