The value of a badge

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Jeffrey
BSA Eagle Scout Badge (Image taken from http://www.sageventure.com/eagle/copy/ )

BSA Eagle Scout Badge

Last night my son and daughter and I attended an Eagle award ceremony—a double Eagle award ceremony—two Scouts from the same Troop being awarded the rank of Eagle Scout on the same evening.

For readers who aren’t familiar with Scouting, Eagle is the highest rank awarded by the Boy Scouts of America. Very few Scouts (between 4 and 5% of all Scouts) earn the rank of Eagle Scout.

These two young men had worked toward a goal set before them nearly a decade earlier. And they achieved this goal through hard work, perseverance, planning, leadership and execution.
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How big is it?

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Jeffrey

Recruiting for a role can be a powerful tool to let your people grow and mature in their abilities by delegating to them certain tasks and responsibilities to stretch themselves.

It can also be cause for resentment, especially in “volunteer” situations.
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Breaking up the team

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Jeffrey

Last month I wrote about Team Development and the four stages a team goes through reaching high levels of performance.

Adjourning

Adjourning

There are some who would add a fifth stage, Adjourning, that would follow the previous four. This stage covers what happens after the project is over, the goal is achieved or the team isn’t needed in its current form. (While I appreciate the mnemonic (oblique rhyme) of the previous four stages, I don’t feel that “Adjourning” carries enough finality with it in describing the breakup of the team.)

So let’s think about reasons for breaking up the team.
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One variable at a time

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Jeffrey

For the past five weeks I’ve been troubleshooting an issue I encountered when I added a well-known hard drive manufacturer’s drive to my system. It’s taking so long partly because it requires seven-to-ten days to reproduce, but also because there might be several pieces (variables) to the puzzle.

Background

I have one of their drives (USB) plugged into my home server and I’m using it to back up all the Macs in my house. After a week or so, the drive will drop off the bus and only unplugging the drive’s power will reset it and allow the system to see it again. Additionally, the management software they included was throwing errors into the system log.
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Becoming a team (quote)

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Jeffrey

[T]hey became a team, a family of two. There had been times before . . . when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn’t mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider, the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time. . . .

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
by E.L. Konigsburg

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References

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Jeffrey

References - available upon requestAs a hiring manager, I always call a candidate’s references. I always ask for them and I always contact them (with a candidate’s permission).

These references tend to give the shiny version of the stories and so I also use Linkedin and my peers and coworkers to augment that list. Sometimes I’m successful and I find one or two contacts I can call and other times I’m not. These people generally give a less-varnished perspective than the list your candidate wants you to call!

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Theory and Experience

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Jeffrey

The torch of theory must illuminate the lessons of experience.

André Roubo, 1790

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Emacs versus vi

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Jeffrey
Why are we hiding from the police, daddy? Because we use emacs son, they use vi.

emacs/vi t-shirt

I have the ThinkGeek t-shirt with the little boy and his dad peering around the corner at the cop car and the boy asking “Why are hiding from the police, daddy?” to which Dad responds “Because we use emacs son, they use vi.”

Of course there’s also a different version of the shirt where the words emacs and vi are reversed, but that’s the whole point—some people use vi and others use emacs.
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Lead Diligently

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Jeffrey

I read a lot. I read to find answers, to receive encouragement and to stay sharp. I read old things and new things, popular material and hard-to-find stuff.

Yesterday I was reading a particularly ancient text which says (in part):

We have different gifts. If your gift is to lead, do it diligently.

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Accidental Leaders

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Jeffrey

Michael Norton over at Doc on Dev brings up some interesting points today in his post on leaders. I’d like to focus on just one.

“Leaders are chosen”, he says, and he’s right. A person can be assigned to your team as a leader or even self-appointed as a leader, but unless the followers choose to follow, there’s not much leading going on.

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