For Christmas this year my wife and I took off and went to Belize. I took some 2,500 pictures and I’m working my way through them. First sighting of Belize on the flight in. ...

In software just about all project management methodologies get labeled one of two things: Agile or Waterfall. There are formal definitions of both labels, but in practice few companies stick to those definitions particularly in the world of consulting. For people who really care about such things, there are actually many more methodologies out there but largely for marketing reasons we call any process that’s linear in nature Waterfall, and any that is iterative we call Agile. ...

This year I took part in Hacktoberfest. Partially to see what all the fuss is about, partially to get myself involved in projects I didn’t know about, and partially for the free t-shirt (which do come in men’s and women’s cuts). If you haven’t run into this project before it’s an effort by Digital Ocean to get people to participate in open source projects. Once you sign up they count all public pull requests you make on Github toward a goal of 5. I participated both as a developer, and by tagging a few issues on my own projects so people would find them. ...

When I was first starting out in IT I had a senior colleague who commented to me about all the throw away knowledge she’d collected and tossed over the years. She talked about learning early versions of VB, an obscure OS for an old HP minicomputer, the aging phone system we had, and all kinds of other things she’d learned in her career that was, or was about to become, useless knowledge. ...

Developers need to be able to in write their primary spoken languages as well as they can writing in their primary programming languages. It takes effort and practice, just like programming does. And you get rusty if you stop for awhile, just like in programming. I started blogging in part to make sure I was writing on a regular basis. When I worked at AFSC I was writing and editing everyday for my work, but the next two jobs I had didn’t expect much writing from me. I’ve written before about the value of my liberal arts education, and the last few weeks have been a testament to effort Hamilton put into making sure I learned the fundamentals of writing. ...

This afternoon my wife and I went to the Families Belong Together protest at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, and organized by a few of their members, Progressives for Democratic Reform, along with a few other like minded groups that think tearing families apart is repugnant (at best). ...

Every time I go through a job search either as a candidate or reviewing applications I try to learn a few things to make sure I am better prepared in the future and to help friends looking for work and talent. I recently completed a job search, so I want to share what I learned this time around. I found a great question for a candidate to ask: “What else should I have asked you?” ...

This is a guest post from my wife, and co-Guardian ad Litem, Elizabeth Georgian. You can read more about our Guardian ad Litem work in this previous post. In a world that at times seems to grow increasingly uncaring, chaotic, and impossible to change, two sets of teenagers, a century apart, living remarkably different lives, may offer us a path forward. On March 25, 1911, 145 textile workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They died of smoke inhalation, flames, or from injuries sustained as they leapt down the elevator shaft or out of the ninth story windows. The factory owners had locked these young, largely immigrant women in their building so they could inspect their bags as they left and on that day no one remembered to free them. ...

Like last year I’m keeping an extremely rough setup of notes from DrupalCon as a repository of things I’m picking up and tracking of sessions that looked like they would be interested but that I couldn’t attend because I was in another session. I’ll clean then up a bit and add to them over time. Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make the event a success. I’ve assembled a playlist of the various sessions I though were good when I attended, or looked good but couldn’t attend. ...

Yesterday my wife and I realized that there was a March for Our Lives being held here in Aiken. When we saw a friend of ours describe her 3-year-old’s first pre-school experience with an active shooter drill we realized that if the local teens could get up early on a Saturday to speak up for themselves, we could not justify staying home. So I charged the camera battery, cleared the memory cards, and made sure I’d have pictures to share. Aiken is a small city in a state that’s hostile to gun control, so even a small crowd is an impressive turn out. The turn out was good, the people were energized, and the kids were clear in their ask: they want to be safe at school and they don’t think that should mean they have to be surrounded by armed guards (police or teachers). ...