10/20/17

Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) 2017

Once again I had the opportunity to attend the Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) in Portland, Oregon in October.  Although "Scaling Quality" was the official theme, the unofficial subtext seemed to be the importance of recognizing that people and teams have feelings. Humanity, doubt, uncertainty and joy were all topics covered by speakers. Unfortunately, I missed Penny Allen's keynote on the first day on "Quality Engineering 2017: Trends, Tricks, and Traps," but here are my sketchnotes from the talks I attended.

In "The Power of Doubt," Zeger Van Hese acknowledges that "I don't know" may be the hardest phrase for any tech team to admit, but at the beginning of any project it is the most honest answer.  He discussed how to use skepticism and the scientific method to explore assumptions and advance incrementally without bias.


Clyneice Chaney's presentation "Trimming Down your QA Effort While Maintaining Quality" covered ways for companies to apply Lean manufacturing principles to QA and development.  She looked at techniques for finding waste and methods for applying Lean solutions.


Taking a cue from Stephen Covey, Phil Lew examined the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Agile." His message is that agile is a long-term habit, and building an agile mindset takes time and should be deliberate.


In Lee Copeland's talk he applied ideas from Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup" to the test environment.  "The Lean Startup Method and Its Value for Testers" related the core ideas of a the book: customer development, the build-measure cycle, the MVP, validated learning and "1 metric" to the testing process.


Katy Sherman started her keynote with a some early morning dancing and then a flashlight poll to ask "Who Owns Quality In Agile?"  Then she got into the tough questions: after the first success of an agile transformation, how to integrate Quality into the full development lifecycle?


A definition of ecology is "the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings."  In his talk "Product Ecology for the Elicitation of Requirements," Ruud Cox explained his method for exploring the relationships between the system under development and the people and environment where it will be used. By using various heuristics he maps the ecology of the stakeholders and other ecosystems such as value chains, supply chains, and user scenarios. He talked about using this method on projects ranging from medical devices to parking lot streetlights.


I didn't get a chance to sketchnote it, but Berglind Bergsdóttir's presentation on "Feeling Like a Fake – The Impostor Syndrome" was inspiring and endearing. Her presentation was both vulnerable and empowering at the same time.

Her team's project was to achieve alignment among all the Scrum teams in the company.  She presented the case study and lessons learned along the way.


In "Scalable, Humane Code Review" Ian Dees pointed out a paradox: sometimes we can be more humane by automating the parts of the process that raise conflict.  As he mentions, "let the robot be the enforcer."



Of all the talks, I was most looking forward to hearing from Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations and the author of "Joy, Inc." Earlier this year I had read his book as part of an Agile book club, and Menlo sounded like an ideal workplace. Later that day I had the opportunity to have dinner with Rich and some other PNSQC attendees, and he was as gracious and interesting as his writer's voice is in the book. My notes on his closing keynote "Build A Workplace People Love – Just Add Joy" are very sparse -- mostly because he covers the details much better in his book, but there were a few points I wanted to pull out for posterity.




10/17/17

Better Software 2017

I had the good opportunity to speak at and attend TechWell's Better Software West in Las Vegas in June, 2017.  I helped present a workshop on Agile Risk Management, which was a great experience, but I also sketched the talks I was able to attend.  Here are some of the highlights.  Click on the images to see larger versions.

Tanya Kravtsov from Audible presented a keynote on "Finding the Bottlenecks in the Agile and DevOps Delivery Cycle."



Neal Ford of Thoughtworks gave a presentation called "Modern Evolutionary Software Architecture." It is based on his new book "Building Evolutionary Architectures."
Its idea is that incremental developments in software engineering practices require rethinking how architecture changes over time. Ford presents ideas for designing an architecture that allows for evolution.


David Litvak gave a wonderful talk called "From Monoliths to Services" about how he used microservice architecture to reduce the system's technical debt.


Agile coaches Bob Galen and Josh Anderson took coaching to the next level by comparing "Football + Agile: Like Peanut Butter & Jelly?".  This was a fun talk, but it also gave some real insights into how coaching can improve the team.


Lisa Calkins talked about project alignment in her presentation "Is Your Project Doomed at the Start?" Her IDGEM method helps product owners and managers understand the real value of the system.



Ken Johnston of Microsoft gave a keynote on "Big Data: The Magic to Attain New Heights." He explained how Microsoft uses big data to assess everything from security and threat detection to a study on preventing SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).


Ryan Ripley of the Agile for Humans podcast gave a really interesting talk on "The No Estimates Movement."  I had previously heard Woody Zuill talk about this, and Ryan's presentation made me eager to try this out. #noEstimates



Some of the most interesting and useful presentations were those that "accidentally" attended. "Agile Release Planning" by Sarah Harper  was one such talk. Within the hour I purchased a book she recommended, "Actionable Agile Metrics."


10/16/17

Pycon 2017

Here are some live sketchnotes from Pycon 2017 in Portland, Oregon

Pycon is a conference covering a variety of topics on the Python programming language. The conference travels around North America, spending two consecutive years in the host city. I missed the 2016 conference, but heeard good things so I wanted to attend while it was still in Portland (the 2018 Pycon will be in Cleveland, Ohio).

Python is a Turing complete programming language which can be used for any software project, but because it has a lot of mathematics libraries it is frequently used by scientific communities for numerical data processing and manipulation.  As an open-source language, it has also a lot of extensions which make it useful as a daily cross-platform utility language. Because of this utility, I expected the talks to span a wide range of topics. I was not disappointed.

Brendan McCollam covered a variety of different web authentication methods: OAuth, OAuth2, OpenID, OpenIDConnect, SAML, and Facebook Connect and the related options with his talk "Web identity: OAuth2 and OpenIDConnect."


I was truly moved and inspired by Susan Tan's "Rants and Ruminations From A Job Applicant After 100 CS Job Interviews in Silicon Valley." As she says "In late August 2016, I quit an uninspiring full-time software job and talked to 100 employers in the San Francisco Bay Area to find the best fit."


Andrew Baker presented "Five Ways to Deploy your Python Web App in 2017." This included ngrok, Heroku, “serverless” with AWS Lambda, Google Compute Engine and Docker.


Moshe Zadka's talk was titled "Automate AWS With Python" and covered how to automate AMI builds, building Cloud Formation Templates and automating S3 bucket management.


Deborah Hanus talked web-scraping with Python and Beautiful Soup in her presenation "Lights, camera, action! Scraping a great dataset to predict Oscar winners."


Likewise, Sam Agnew of Twilio led the crowd in an amazing demo, using the FCEUX NES emulator to hack into the Legend of Zelda and hooking it up with Flask and Twilio so the crowd could control game play through texting in his talk "Hacking Classic Nintendo Games with Python."



I didn't take sketchnotes on "Hacking Cars with Python," but it was an especially interesting presentation. I never realized how much data is available in even 2010 cars.  Eric Evenchick inspired me to buy an OBD2 Car Diagnostic Scanner and try it out.


In his presentation "Look mum no hands! From blinking LEDs to a bike speedometer with MicroPython," Tim Head showed how to hack together a micro-controller in a wifi-enabled speedometer for your bike, using MicroPython.


10/15/17

2017 Terroir Creative Writing Festival

These sketchnotes are from the 2017 Terroir Creative Writing Festival, held April 2017 at Chemeketa Community College, McMinnville.  The one-day festival is a mix of talks by authors and poets, as well as some interactive writing workshops.  The conference is organized by the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County, with the tagline "Our vision is to make Yamhill County a creative arts community."

Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., was completely amazing. Her keynote emphasized the human impact on species extinction and then underlined how artists, writers and visionaries are needed to have the influence to preserve Earth's diversity. Moore is a philosopher, climate activist, and the author or co-editor of thirteen books including "Great Tide Rising" and "Piano Tide." www.riverwalking.com


 Andrea Stolowitz held a group reading of the play "Teeth" and then led a writing exercise wherein we created a setting and populated it with characters and a backstory. www.andreastolowitz.com

Author C. Morgan Kennedy, talked about world building and creating a context for your genre novel. Kennedy also writes The Melting Pot: Stories with Diversity & Multiculturalism column for Night Owl Reviews’ The Booklover e-magazine. www.cmorgankennedy.com


Daniel Wilson, author of "How to Survive a Robot Uprising," "Robopocalypse," and other books talked about his new novel "Clockwork Dynasty" and provided his unique take on writing science fiction.


I also caught the afternoon keynote by Oregonian columnist Steve Duin. He talked about the power of comics such as in Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home." He also listed some of the most amazing recent graphic novels:


Jeff Lemire's "Essex County" and "Royal City"



Nate Powell's "Swallow Me Whole"



Lefevre's "The Photographer", a graphic documentary subtitled "Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders."





Mariko Tamaki "This One Summer"


Royden Lepp's "Rust."











The website for the annual festival is terroircreativewritingfestival.com. Or you can join their Facebook page for more info.