High time for an update (Kindle, Blog software, and Websites)
So much to talk about…
Kindle Update
For Christmas, Catherine gave me a Kindle. I love it. The first book I purchased on Christmas Day was The Best of 2600. It seemed to take forever to get through that book, but when you consider that the hard cover is 888 pages, I think it went pretty well. Since I do most of my reading in bed (without my contacts in), I love the fact that I can make the text size huge, but then use a normal size when I can see again.
Once I finished 2600, I purchased Coders at Work and User Interface Design for Programmers. I read a few chapters of the former, and am flying through the latter. It is really making me want to go though my UI’s I make for work and think about them a little more.
Blog Software
I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and saw this post about using hyde to generate a blog, in the spirit of Jekyll. An excuse to not use memory is always a good idea. I played with it a bit yesterday, but couldn’t get it to generate a blog the way I wanted. Oh well, I’ll keep running this on Django.
New Projects
My fire department’s website is done! I purchased the domain a couple months ago, and we decided to go live for our banquet a couple weeks ago. Its written on top of Django (surprised?), and has a bunch of cool features, like tracking OSHA hours, attendance, event calendars, and a member portal.
Its available at http://rexfordfire.org/
Agile Development at Work
At work, a group that we have a relationship with is using Agile, and told us a bit about their operations. We’re in the progress of starting a new project, and decided to try and apply Agile to it.
We started with 2 week iterations, and a 15 minute Scrum at the end of each day. We successfully finished our first iteration on Friday, and there was a general consensus that all went well.
Support Software
This other group uses Rally, which is licensed, and our company has notoriously slow purchasing procedures, so we decided against this. I already had an underused Trac instance running on our development support server. I combined it with the Timing and Estimation Plugin and Scrum Burndown Plugin.
Posted 24 Jan 2010