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Not long ago, I read somewhere that clutter is just a pile of deferred decisions. OMG. So many things began to make sense: clutter, ever-growing to-do lists… That paper over there? If I could just decide where to put it, it’d be put away already. That list of items to do for the house? Yep, if I could decide how to tackle them, they’d be a piece of cake. This thing I need to do for work, but something is stopping me? There’s a decision somewhere in there that I’m deferring. ...

A bit of personal news: I’m starting on 10/15 as a Principal Software Engineer with StitchFix! I am going to be helping build up a newer function within the company which touches on many aspects of the business, including data science, marketing and warehousing, so I am very excited. I’ll be partnered with great folks running the business side of things, while helping build up a strong engineering team. It’s also fully remote. It’s a win, from my perspective, and I hope it is from theirs, too! ...

Not long after my last post on the relative dearth of startups in Montgomery County, the news came out that 1776 is starting a new campus in North Bethesda, near the Twinbrook metro station! This is exciting news! The 1776 @ Greencourt Innovation Center will help build and sustain a community of entrepreneurs and innovators who are translating new ideas into products, services and ventures destined to transform our region and beyond. Across the street from the newly renovated Federal Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) Montgomery County headquarters and less than half a mile from the Twinbrook Metro Station, in the heart of North Bethesda’s warehouse district. ...

The first article in this series addressed how to fit sprints to business context, with the analogy that people naturally change their routines when they go on vacation, almost without thinking about it. This second installment will talk about intentionally bringing the breaks people take in personal life into software engineering schedules, in a way that makes teams more productive. In a perfect world, software backlogs would be forever neatly groomed, maintained and prioritized. Features would always be delivered the right way, the first time. Long-term goals would be balanced with short-term goals. There would be no quick hacky fixes, and technical debt would not accumulate. Of course, nobody is perfect. These things don’t happen unless they get prioritized. But what if these things could occur without managers having to explicitly prioritize them? What if they passively became part of the process? ...

It’s fairly standard for Scrum ceremonies to be arranged according to the work week. Sprint Planning and Kickoff on Mondays, grooming sessions in the middle of the week, Sprint Demo and Retrospective on Friday. But is this the best sprint alignment for your team? When planning team sprint ceremonies, take a lesson from vacationing on the beach. What do we do at the beach? There are two types of vacationers: outing goers and beach-sitters. I’ll speak to the latter, since that’s what I know best. Beach-sitters, as we are in my family, go to the beach to sit, swim, and snack. A typical daily schedule looks like the following: ...

Update, 9/16/2019: 1776 is expanding to North Bethesda. Bethesda and Silver Spring, MD, are truly up-and-coming areas. Great for walkable and metro-accessible entertainment and restaurants. They are rapidly becoming more dense, urban, and with the opening of the Purple Line approaching, more connected. What they lack, however, are cutting-edge, high-paying technology jobs. These areas are ripe with well-educated populations, with a mix of ages and experience, young and old. Why they are not a more popular destination for startups and technology companies to place their businesses is a mystery. Similar suburban areas in Virginia, such as Arlington (especially Clarendon), Tyson’s Corner, and Reston, have had a huge burst of technology startup activity over the last ten years. Montgomery county’s urban areas, if anything, have likely lost tech jobs, e.g. with the departure of Discovery from their Silver Spring landmark building. ...

I recently installed Xubuntu on my old Thinkpad T410s, in the hopes that it would be a lighter and faster distribution for my aging, beloved, but soon to be replaced workhorse. I am not particularly enjoying the experience after several years of Linux Mint, but that is for another post. Mapping CapsLock to Escape is an essential step for vim users. This is covered by an easy keyboard tweaks submenu in Mint, but not so in Xubuntu. It took some searching, trial and error to find a working command. In Session and Startup, add an item: ...

(Or… how to get work done on a Mac if you’re a Linux junky.) While normally a Linux user, my current employer has very kindly (and through great institutional effort) supplied me with a gorgeous MacBook Air. I was a Mac user about eight years ago (OSX Tiger!), but switched to Linux full-time a couple years after that, when I realized I just felt more productive in that environment. The few can’t live without ’em features for me in Linux include: ...

Earlier today, I installed Solr on top of OpenJDK 1.6, running Tomcat 6. That went just fine, but I ran into trouble later, when I tried to install OpenGrok, which requires JDK 1.7. When I ran ant, I got this error: -do-compile: [javac] Compiling 245 source files to /usr/local/src/OpenGrok/build/classes [javac] javac: invalid target release: 1.7 This was strange, since at the suggestion of this StackOverflow answer, I put this line after my opening <project> tag of build.xml ...

I’m currently configuring an Ubuntu server with an NVidia Tesla GPU unit. In the interest of actually getting things done with it, we are going to try out the PyCUDA library. The PyCUDA Installation Docs for Linux don’t refer to installation via pip, but I wanted to give it a try. It mostly went without a hitch, except for a couple of things. You’ll need to make sure that the cuda bin directory is on the system path. ...