Be your own headhunter or how talent is found

When I finished high school, I had no idea what the next step would be. Shall I study math? It was an obvious choice, I had won some competitions. Or shall I become a rabbi?

What's the problem you are trying to solve?

The meeting room is dead silent, people are standing in a shock unable to grok what just happened. A few minutes ago I shared my idea with them. Mark glimpsed at me and asked a short question. “So what’s the problem you are trying to solve?” The next moment I jumped over the empty chair between us, grabbed his head, and bumped it to the desk. Two times, to be precise. There was an awful thump sound. Now we are waiting for something to happen. Mark looks up, blood smeared all over his face, his nose stands in an acute angle that doesn’t suit the original plan of the human face. He’s trying to say something, but he has difficulty breathing. He finally collects himself to utter a sentence, “I’m sorry I asked that question”. I smile and pat his shoulder, “it’s OK, dude, we are over it”.

The long story before "the end": How to finish a narrative essay

In the beginning there was nothing, no internet, no iPhone, no pizza, and no microwave oven. In the beginning it was easy for God to create something. He could create anything and fail, no big deal. Let there be dinosaurs, for example, if they prove to be too big and slow, we can get rid of them later. The whole creation was a six day long, non-stop party, nothing prevented God from letting his imagination loose.

The weekly post challenge

We entertained the idea for weeks. No, months now. Then it happened, my friend challenged me. This is what he wrote me.

I hereby challenge you to blog once a week, on the same day of each week, between midnight at the beginning of that day until midnight of the following day. We must announce on our blogs that this is our plan; that we will publish weekly on the same day.

It does not matter how long the posting is. Even a few sentences making up a short paragraph.

We will refer to one another's blogs in the first posting announcing weekly publishing. I choose Wednesday. It would be good if you would publish on Wednesdays too, but you can choose another day.

Challenge taken. I hereby announce I'll publish a post every Wednesday... until September. Then I'll re-examine how much I like the idea. Follow me. And follow my friend at The Dream Warrior.

Morning greetings

I work for DreamWare. We greet each other with a handshake or a kiss on the cheek every morning (well, it's a kiss only when at least one woman is involved). There are occasional hugs, too. We are happy to see each other and we are not afraid of letting others know it.

How we plan to use Trello for Scrum

No

Trello-Office

• Time spent and estimated
• Burndown chart
• Last release: v1.3 2014-02-16
• No website, no source

TrelloCRM

• No screenshot
• Based on Scrum for Trello
• Last release: 1.87, 2014-06-11
• Links to developers provided
• Not really suitable for project management

Scrullo

• Last release: 2013-01-02
• Wrong github link provided
• Looks inactive

Points for Trello

• Points are not always calculated
• See Points for Trello - Combined edition for a more stable implementation

As an addition

Background Colors Cards for Trello

• Uses only the six colors available for labels
• When a card has more labels, the rightmost color is picked
• Use it as an addition to a project management extension

Kanban WIP for Trello

• You can add WIP limits to lists
• The list becomes red when you exceed the set limit
• Open source: https://github.com/NateHark/TrelloWIPLimits

Progress for Trello

• Display a progress bar using cards or points from Scrum for Trello or checklist items
• Open source: https://github.com/Cycododge/Progress-For-Trello

Trello Card Dependencies

• Graph visualization
• Click on cards to add or remove dependency between them

Projects for Trello

• A card can be tagged with multiple project names
• You cannot view cards for a tag
• Based on Scrum for Trello
• Open source: https://github.com/agebase/projects-for-trello

OGD’s enhancements for Trello

• Summarize points
• Different display of cards without points
• Highlight cards with label color (they call it separator cards)

Ultimello

• Sort cards by title, votes, due date, labels
• Save cards in sorted order or revert to original order
• Developer’s email provided
• No source

Maybe (in descending order of how sophisticated it is)

Plus for Trello

• Most sophisticated

Points for Trello - Combined Edition

• Add points to card title, sum of points are displayed for each list, grandtotal for the whole board
• Three types of points, depending on the parenthesis used
• Based on Scrum for Trello and Points for Trello
• Open source: https://github.com/jgraglia/Trello-Points

Scrum for Trello

• Source: http://github.com/Q42/TrelloScrum
• Summarize points for a list and for the whole board
• Two types of points, depending on the parenthesis used
• When cards are filtered, only the points on filtered cards are summed

The selected combination

• Scrum for Trello
• Plus for Trello
• Projects for Trello
• Card colors for Trello

Big refactoring

I started to refactor a file of a few hundred lines of code. I had a vision how clean it will look. It took more days until I realized it takes more time to refactor the whole file. My tech-lead suggested to cut the task which I did and refactored only one class. It became really cleaner. It could've been used as a base class but people didn't use it but continued to use the quick and uglier way of the other classes.

I started to refactor a file of similar size now because it always takes some mental effort for me and for me coworkers to understand the structure of the file. It was written by one of the coding heroes of the company, it's dense and tangled and still verbose at the same time. It takes a few minutes to run all the tests for it so I made a relatively big change that didn't look harmful, I was just factoring out some helper functions. When I finished, I ran the tests and they failed. I got frustrated. It took me quite some time to find out that I had forgot to set an environment variable before running the tests. There was even a warning printed that could've suggested that but it was lost in the many lines of other logging output.