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Archive for August, 2009

Geohashing at Eden Development

Geohashing is a game, best described as a random adventure generator! It combines the Dow Jones stock market index with the current date, performs an MD5 hash function, and converts from hexadecimal to decimal coordinates in order to generate a series of geographic coordinates all over the country. There’s usually a geohash within about 50 miles of your location, and it changes every day.

The aim of the game is simply to reach the coordinates, with possible side effects being the opportunity to get out, see new places, meet other people doing the same thing, play games at the geohash, etc.

On Sunday 30th August 2009 something very exciting happened: the geohash landed at Barton Farm, right next to the office of Eden Development! This was especially exciting since I (Aimee) am a keen geohasher! I came home early from my weekend away in Essex, and 4 geohashers came to celebrate!

Found the geohash location, right near the office

We had to photograph the location for documentation purposes.

Geohash party at The Granary

Chris very kindly let us have a geohash celebration party in the office!

Geohashing tutorial on the whiteboard

I did a little tutorial on the whiteboard about how the geohash is calculated, and how it ended up on Barton Farm.

A poster we left on the telegraph pole as a marker

We printed and laminated a poster, showing us celebrating the geohash! Hopefully it’ll stay there for a while to come!

Here is a video montage i’ve made, with animoto.com:

For more information about the day’s events have a look on the geohashing wiki: wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/2009-08-30_51_-1

Posted on: Monday, August 31st, 2009 Posted in fun, geohashing | 3 Comments »

BizConf 2009: Thoughts and Pictures

So, BizConf. A conference for people who do business on the web, with only 75 attendees, Florida, 20-21 August. It was a stretch to go that far, but it was so worth the trip. Some highlights for me:

Photography Seminar

Photography Seminar

The Content: There were four tracks, which surprised me for such a small conference, but after a while I realised that it was a deliberate play to get the numbers in the seminars down. It worked: every seminar I went to was interactive and interesting. I especially enjoyed the Improv seminar with Jesse, and the photography seminar with Duncan Davidson (pictured above). Most conferences I end up at are very tech-focused, and it was refreshing to try some different things.

Three hour impromtu hallway seminar

Three hour impromtu Jerry Weinberg hallway seminar

HallwayConf: the conversations in the hallway are in my opinion the best bit going to these things. In this case, the speaker/attendee ratio was 1:2, which meant that the level of conversation was the highest I’ve experienced at any conference. We talked agile (small ‘a’ :-), ruby, business, cashflow, hiring, pairing, solving intractable world political issues over scotch, you name it. There were no cliques, and everyone listened as much as talked. Everyone threw a few thoughts into the mix, and collected some great ideas in return.

Jerry Weinberg and Corey Haines

Jerry Weinberg and Corey Haines

Jerry Weinberg: talking and listening to Jerry was humbling. It’s so easy to forget your years and think you’re some hotshot, whereas actually with my paltry decade of experience I’m at the very beginning of my professional career. I’ve a lot to learn and had an amazing opportunity to rethink many of my own ideas in the light of hard earned wisdom.

Five hours for breakfast

Five hours for breakfast

Perhaps this experience sums it up: I went down for breakfast the day after the conference at about 9:30am (my jet-lag got me up rather earlier than expected after a great after-party). People drifted down at different times and we all got talking. And talking. The conversation continued right there in the restaurant for another five hours: I stayed so late after breakfast I got hungry again and had lunch too. I only reluctantly left to catch a plane. Nobody wanted it to stop.

I started some great friendships with some fantastic people and I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation, starting now. I’m only beginning to realise how much I’ve got out of it now I’m back in the office: a decision I’ve been putting off now appears obvious, my head is buzzing with ideas, and I feel inspired to raise my game even further.

Thanks to Obie for hosting and the Hashrocket guys (especially Jen and Jim for doing such a great job). I’ve put together a reading list of some of the books that were recommended here.

Posted on: Monday, August 24th, 2009 Posted in agile, business, conferences | 4 Comments »

Introducing Jabbersonic

I’ve been working on improving our build process recently and have been inspired by several articles on Extreme Feedback devices.

Specifically, this blog post at Pragmatic Automation caught my attention: I really liked the idea of being able to listen to complex systems such as a project management flow. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could control a varied soundscape with, say, Jabber messages?

So after four hours of hacking late last night, Jabbersonic was born.

It’s pretty easy to get started. If you’re on a mac with iLife installed it should work out of the box:

sudo gem install gosu xmpp4r-simple
git clone git://github.com/ChrisMDP/jabbersonic.git
cd jabbersonic
bin/server

This will kick off a gosu app which will listen for Jabber messages sent to the provided account and play different sounds corresponding to different events. An example of usage:

Jabbersonic in Action

Jabbersonic in Action

It’s currently set up for a continuous integration system – it should be trivial to make the Hudson Jabber plugin talk to it, and write a tiny API app for Hoptoad for example. It’s not confined to project management though: there’s a simple configuration file which allows you to make it work for pretty much any complex system you might want to model.

For more information, see the README. Opinion is divided here as to whether a soundscape is actually useful for project management or just an irritation: I guess it will mostly depend on the sound design, but we’ve yet to try it out properly.

Let me know if you try it out, or use it for anything useful.

Posted on: Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 Posted in agile, code | 1 Comment »