Occasional Comment

I’m getting a little flippant here, I know. The title of this post is taken from the title of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young? I can’t remember at this point) song. I have been writing 750 words daily for almost two years now. I haven’t been writing in my blog hardly at all. I think it’s time to remedy that situation. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up or what style I’ll adopt. I suppose we’ll see what develops together. I am going to try to be a little more regular with my posting here. I think it will be a good adjunct to my other writing activities, so long as I don’t let it get out of hand. I do tend to become obsessive about my habits.

I will probably use several different tools to write these blogs. I have the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox and I have several apps on my iPad that I may use from time to time. I’ll be interested to see if and how the tool affects the content. For one thing, I’ve already learned that the iPad is not a tool that encourages lots of text entry. I haven’t tried pairing a wireless keyboard with it yet. It kind of seems to miss the point of a tablet IMHO. Anyway, we’ll see how resolute I am about posting more frequently. The secret’s in the sauce.

I am sitting at home waiting for a call from the auto shop telling me that my car is ready to be picked up. I am not a very happy camper about the way this repair has gone. I took my car in last Thursday and they still don’t have it fixed as of 12:30 on Tuesday. I don’t think I’ll be using these guys again. It may be more trouble taking the van to a shop in Huntsville but it will probably be a better experience over all.

I haven’t been writing much on this blog but I have been writing a minimum of 750 words a day on 750words for over a year now. I will start posting here again though. I just updated to WordPress 3.2. I like the auto-update feature. I got inspired to update when I was cleaning up my hosting site earlier today.

I downloaded the WordPress iPad app and I’m trying it out with this post. It is about as easy as any iPad text app can be. I will probably prefer it to my Star Trek themed app. Let’s face it, writing on an iPad without an external keyboard is hunt and peck any way you slice it. If you’re dedicated enough, you could post to a blog using Morse code. It wouldn’t be much different than this.

I am developing some software at work by myself. I have worked on several different styles of Agile team in the past, e.g. Scrum and XP, and I decided to think a little about what Agile practices are appropriate for a team of one.

First up, the daily tag-up, otherwise known in some circles as “the Scrum”, doesn’t serve the same purpose that it does on a larger team. You probably should set aside a moment, perhaps first thing in the morning, to review your progress from the day before, identify any obstacles you need to address to proceed, and make note of what you intend to do today. That should take very little time since you don’t have to explain what you mean to anyone else. Communication is the benefit and the major time sink, of the Scrum.

Next, a backlog is useful. I consider it another name for my todo list but it is a little more formal than some todo lists. I keep it sorted in order of highest priority first. I mark each major item with a status, e.g. ready, in-work, waiting on <resource> etc. I also use an outliner to keep track of my backlog so that I can easily represent subtasks.

I have added a practice that I learned from Dave Winer, called Narrate Your Work. It is particularly useful for me since I don’t have the benefit of a colleague to discuss my project with. By narrating my work, I get down the essence of what I’m doing and why so that I can remember what I’m trying to accomplish and the decisions that I have made along the way.

I haven’t had to do any estimating yet so I haven’t done anything like the planning game. I have a suspicion that you need three or more team members for the planning game to work very well. I also haven’t divided the work up into sprints. That seems like over kill for the one person team.

I will be doing periodic evaluations that will correspond somewhat to the end of sprint retrospectives. I think the key here again is that since I don’t have anyone to discuss it with, it is just a matter of taking a moment to think about what I’ve learned to date in the project.

I just noticed that in the last post I made here I was talking about trying to post weekly. It’s been over a month and a half and I haven’t posted once. I need to figure out a process to include blogging in my daily routine. That is how Dave Winer does it and he invented blogging. Not like Al Gore invented the internet. More like the way Edison invented the light bulb. There were other people doing things that approximated blogging when Dave invented it but he put all the pieces together, named it and championed it. Thanks, Dave.

I am enjoying my experience with writing my morning pages on 750 Words and I have noticed lately that the quality of my writing has improved. I guess practice improves anything. I write my morning words as a stream-of-consciousness type of activity. I don’t try to break them up into paragraphs and I don’t worry about staying on topic. I hope that blogging will help me develop those other skills.

I keep getting notices that people are creating accounts on my blog. Are any of these accounts people that are reading the blog or are they all people promoting something (spammers)? If you are a real person reading this and you have a minute, drop me a line at my gmail acount. It’s jkelliemiller. I’m assuming you can figure out the address. After all, you are a human being, not a spam bot.

If I don’t start blogging more frequently I’ll have to change the name of my blog from Occasional Comment to Rare Comment.  I have established a habit of writing morning pages of at least 750 Words with the help of the web site of the same name. It should not take any great effort to post here at least once a week. After all, I don’t typically write more than a couple of hundred words in any one post.

I guess the major hold up is deciding what to say.  As a rule, I don’t want to write about anything here that is going to take more than a couple of hundred words to say. Many of the ideas that I have would take thousands of words to say and many hours to write. I intend to write about some of those ideas and maybe I’ll write about some of them here, but probably not any time soon. I have too many things on my plate as it is to try to take on another commitment right now. So for the short term, I’m going to try to post here once a week and keep it to two or three paragraphs per post. I know my reader(s?) will forgive me if I get a little long winded on occasion.

I’m back. I have been off expanding my horizons with techniques gleaned from Julia Cameron’s excellent book, The Artist’s Way, among others. I found out about the book when I stumbled across an interesting website, http://750words.com/. It turns out that three pages of handwritten text comes out to seven hundred and fifty words. The web site keeps track of how many words you write, as you write them and rewards you with cute graphic badges when you meet various milestones. I started out writing to earn the badges and discovered that writing every morning helped clear my mind and improved my productivity all day long.

I also got my iPad on April 30th. I have spent the last month integrating it into my daily life. It has changed many aspects of my life so far and I expect it to continue to change it. I am discovering so many ways to use it. I am composing this post on it using an application called Captain’s Blog. It is a whimsical mock-up of the Star Trek the Next Generation computer interface. I have found a number of apps that allow me to draw diagrams, take notes, play games, make music, read ebooks, and much more. I don’t know how I managed without it. It, along with the announcement of the iPhone 4, has convinced me to leave Verizon for AT&T in spite of their coverage problems and poor customer service reputation.

I am a little upset by all the negative press that the nay sayers have been giving the iPad. I haven’t even gotten my iPad yet (I waited for a 3G model) and already I’m being told that it is only a toy. It is not as good as a netbook and much more expensive. I’ll give it to Sign543, he has managed to review the iPad withoug dampening my enthusiasm with his comments, not that they were all positive.

I must say, this feels like when I was a teenager and all my guitar playing friends were getting electric guitars and I was given a classical guitar with a ceramic pickup in it. By the time I actually got a real electric guitar, some of my enthusiasm had been dampened. I ended up being enthusiastic about the guitar anyway because it was so cool. But some of the social coolness of it was squashed by poor timing. I suppose much the same thing will be true with the iPad. After all, many of my friends on the Mac discussion list at work have decided to wait for the 3G version as well.

I have been very busy lately so I haven’t spent as much time studying up on iPad/iPhone development as I was for a while there. I will get back into it but I’ve got so many other responsibilities making demands on my time that it is frustrating. I did find a great resource on iTunes University. It is the complete video lectures from the Stanford University class CS193P on iPhone development.

I found a great book this weekend. It’s Cocoa® Programming Developer’s Handbook, Second Edition, by David Chisnall, published by Addison-Wesley Professional. It provides a very complete coverage of this broad subject but, unlike many of the other books I’ve read on the topic, it assumes that the reader is already a competent programmer. The author tells how Cocoa started life as NeXTStep on the NeXT computer and follows its evolution through a collaboration with Sun Microcomputers which resulted in OpenStep until Apple bought NeXT and adopted OpenStep as the heart of it’s development of OS X.

The book is wide, deep and fast paced. Don’t be frustrated if you find yourself having to read some sections more than once.  It includes an historical overview, a survey of the languages that have interfaces to Cocoa and why you might want to consider using each of them, an overview of the Developer Tools that Apple supplies to write applications with Cocoa, and of course, in depth discussions of how to use all of the various frameworks that comprise Cocoa (e.g. Core Framework, Core Graphics, Core Data, Core Audio, etc.) It also discusses the philosophy of Document-Driven Applications that was pioneered by Apple on the Mac. It frames these discussions with plenty of code examples that help place them in a practical context.

I’ve been a long time fan of Dave Winer. While I often agree with his insights on software, the internet, technology, etc., I always appreciate his succinct, well reasoned writing, whether I agree with him or not. His recent article on the iPad announcement is a case in point.

While I am still in the thrall of Steve Job’s reality distortion field, Dave’s article helped me to stop and think. I realized that the iPad was version one of a new category of product. As such, it is far from the ideal product that the category will eventually produce. After all, the first iPod was a shadow of the product that the modern iPod has become.

None the less, I will buy an iPad because I have been waiting for this product category to hit the market for at least twenty years. I want to write apps for it. I am not thrilled with Apple’s app approval process but I have gold fever and the rush is on.

I guess my point is that Dave’s writing provokes thought. The more thought provoking writing that you read, the more likely you are to write thought provoking essays yourself. At least that’s my theory. I guess we’ll see how well it works out.