Tag Archives: office

Fast Post-Mortems

Posted on by
Reply

When it’s time for a post-mortem meeting, do people in your office groan and make excuses? Do your coworkers complain that they’re too busy with client work to attend? Do post-mortems feel like a chore with no payoff?

I think everyone agrees that post-mortems are a great idea, in theory. When you finish a project, you get everyone from the team together to talk about what went well and what went poorly. Ideally, the knowledge gained is shared with the rest of the company, and you can avoid making the same mistakes over and over.

In reality, however, I’ve found that most offices either skip post-mortems entirely, or they’re so poorly run that everyone resents them. In many cases, the post-mortem meeting is run by the project manager or team lead, who is understandably motivated to find the project was a success. Continue reading →

Be Nice

Posted on by
Reply

“I don’t care how good you are at programming, finding bugs, whatever. If you’re rude, or if you speak poorly to people who don’t understand your… quirks… you will wind up being shunted to the side. No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.”
– Catherine Powell (via 37signals)

Back on Deck

Posted on by
Reply

The first day back in the office after a vacation is always a bit overwhelming. I’ve been in the office for over two hours now, and I’m just now getting all caught up so I can get some work done — and this was for a vacation when everyone else was out of the office, too.

While on break, I didn’t read email or check my feed reader. Upon returning I hardly had any email, but I had over a thousand unread items in google reader.

I wish I had been able to write more blog posts recently, but between the holidays, visiting friends and family, playing video games, and taking care of a sick baby, it just didn’t happen. I’ll be fixing that this week, and the December newsletter will be up by the end of the week.

Steve's Office

Posted on by
4

i haven’t slept well in months. my room is large and the walls are empty, except for a few photographs of stephanie and me, an arrangement of leaves my sister gave me when i moved to california, a whiteboard, and a chinese painting on fabric (red fabric, which signifies a good life – it was probably intended as a birthday-gift painting).

my living room has the following items of note: bartok’s duets for violin (44 tunes in two books), an old speaker designed by henry kloss in use as a coffee table (books: the latin translation of winnie the pooh, the tao te ching), and toys my dog likes to play with.

the kitchen has one of the neatest items i’ve obtained in a long time- this oriental tea set. it was a christmas gift from stephanie, whom i still love dearly and whose presence and warmth and company i miss every day we’re apart. i haven’t had a chance to cook myself a gourmet chinese meal since my return, but when i do so i will employ my rice cooker, my 22″ wok, and my chinese tea set.

Edit 10/26/2005: We no longer have any control over the fojar domain name, and so this link is broken.

My Office

Posted on by
2

I spend at least 8 hours a day sitting a room measuring 8 feet by 7 feet. My desk is against one wall, and holds my 19 inch monitor that I stare at all day long and wonder if it’s giving me cancer. My decent speakers and the subwoofer I got from Egghead when the store closed are plugged into the soundcard that’s built into my motherboard, but I don’t think I can really tell the difference between it and an expensive sound card. The speakers are playing a large playlist that contains approximately 8 gigabytes of mp3s, and if you want to, you can listen to it, too. The phone cord runs from the wall to my left to my DSL modem, which is sitting on top of my computer under my desk on my right. An ethernet cable snakes up the wall to the hub-switch I mounted on the wall. Two more ethernet cables come out of the hub, one running back down to my computer, and one running out the door up around the ceiling of the living room to Annie’s computer. The door to the living room is to my right, and to my left is a little tiny window, with a view onto the street. There’s some pegs above the window, that a bunch of headphones are hanging on. Directly above my computer on the wall is an old light fixture, which has no lights in it because they shone in my eyes, and I bought a torch lamp instead. A little Cthulu doll is sitting on the light fixture. There is a shelf on the wall to my left, which holds at least seven books on HTML, two on PHP, and numerous others, as well as a jar full of dice from my roleplaying days, and some toys (an orc, a space marine, and a zerg). There’s a CD rack in the back left corner, holding all my computer-related CDs, and a wire-mesh trash can in the back right corner, which the previous tenant left here, but I kind of liked, so I kept it. Sitting on top of the CD rack is the silver-plated, engraved mouse that KT got me. Hanging on the walls are an old ID from when I worked on the tek team, a Blues Brothers poster, two Obey Giant posters, An iMac poster, a Barbarella poster, and a poster of the Mac G4 cube. I think I’m going to buy more Macintosh posters. Hanging in the middle of the G4′s monitor is the Ninja Star that Miles got me for Christmas.

I spend more than 8 hours a day in this room, almost every day of the week. And I love it!

My non-work accomplishments this week:

  • I set up an FCS family weblog for David.
  • I got Apache up and running on my computer, and found out how to make symbolic links on a windows machine, so I didn’t have to copy everything into the Apache public directory (If you’re interested, the utility for this is called Junction, and I got it from sysinternals.com).
  • Deciding to give Zach an admin account here on Rusted so that I won’t feel the need to post long, rambling descriptions of my room just so there’s a new post on the front page.

Edit 10/26/2005: Shortly after I set up my streaming music, I shut it down due to changes in the laws that made it illegal.