Archive for September, 2014
Old towns, and legacy software
On our road trip from Austin to Portland, we stopped in a handful of towns that were booming in the late 19th century. In particular, Pendleton, Oregon made an impression. They were exhibiting serious effort and success revitalizing the town. Pendleton has a rich and interesting history, but has...
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Keeping talented employees
I saw a tweet the other day about the eight things that keep talented employees: Talented employees stay when they're:
1 paid well
2 mentored
3 challenged
4 inspired
5 empowered
6 appreciated
7 on a mission
8 having fun — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) August 17, 2014 I’m normally not a fan of reducing human behavior to...
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Two weeks is the worst sprint length
Mike Cohn over at Mountain Goat Software says this in My Primary Criticism of Scrum: In today’s version of Scrum, many teams have become overly obsessed with being able to say they finished everything they thought they would. This leads those teams to start with the safe approach. Many...
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Japanese vs. Western models of decision making
I was reading a book about The Toyota Way last year (sorry, can’t remember which) and something that stuck with me was a section on Japanese versus Western decision making*. The diagram was something like this: The crux of it is, Japanese companies like Toyota spend more time preparing...
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Escaping the Windows prison
My friend Brad Clark over at Rigging Dojo is organizing a course on Maya’s C++ API (I am assuming it is Maya but could be another program). He had a question about student access to Visual Studio, to which I responded: @riggingdojo I cannot imagine doing a worse disservice...
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Can you quantify trust?
In a previous article, commenter Robert Kist asked: How are you going to judge if people trust you – what would your indicators be, if you decide to treat it as a metric? This is tricky. I don’t think there’s a good answer. Bad managers, who are by definition...
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Metaprogramming with the type function
In my book, Practical Maya Programming with Python, I use Python’s type function for dynamically creating custom Maya nodes based on specifications, such as input and output attributes. I really love the type function*, so I thought I’d post another cool use of it. I recently wrote this gem...
