Recently, I had the opportunity to read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (on O’Reilly ) and wanted to provide my thoughts on it. The book follows the story of Kathryn, who took the position of CEO at a dying startup tech company. The company can’t ship software effectively and is having internal problems with its C-Suite leadership team. The team itself is highly dysfunctional and cannot come to a single decision in multiple hours of meetings.

“I was nearly sure last night. He’s becoming real.” “But we’re all real!” At least, you are, and I suppose I am." “But he’s becoming more real. Extremely real. Nearly as real as Death, and you don’t get much realler…” I read that line in Mort by Terry Pratchett, a comical coming of age story, and it stuck with me. If we’re good engineers, we’re always on the move so to speak.

At work we use Jira heavily, and while it’s a very powerful project management tool, some days it can feel like it’s too restrictive. For my side projects, I keep using GitHub Projects and the difference is staggering between the two softwares. I find that I keep going back to GitHub Projects when I get frustrated with Jira. I find myself going to set up a new project to test views, statuses, and other properties when I find I can’t do what I want in Jira.

I’ve recently started programming more in Python, and wanted to document how the process of getting more experience in a new language is. One of the first things I’ve done is go being skimming books on Python. I’m currently reading through Think Python , and have picked many interesting tidbits of info on Python. While some may think it’s a waste of time to start at the beginning of a language, its not.

Over the past two years or so, I’ve been working on a new way of measuring work. This has evolved from a simple task list of things I need to get done for the sprint and other tasks, like reminding myself to ask someone a question or put in for time off. This concept has evolved into a daily note that houses three main areas to put tasks: Goals, Meetings, and Bonus Items.

As all good programmers do when learning something new, I’m starting this blog with Hello World! In this first article I hope to accomplish the following: Why did I decide to start this blog? What do I want out of this? What to expect How did I make it? Why make a blog? The idea of a blog has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Looking back at the last year of notes, I’ve found various ideas and pages tagged as “blog post” ranging from technology to project management.