Taarradhin

Five Things I Accomplished

Next week I am conducting an Agile user story workshop for a large group of newish product owners. I’ve only done this type of training for developers/project leads so reworking it to fit folks who aren’t used writing up requirements was an interesting exercise on its own.

This year my team chose Deep Dive as their book club choice, we had our kickoff meeting covering the first chapter last week and I think it went pretty well. No surprise the content was focused on explaining strategic thinking and reviewing statistics around the impact to business.

I finally finished Agile Estimating & Planning, not sure why this one was so difficult to get through other than the perception that the content (in my mind) was challenging. Turns out that I learned some excellent tips on getting my team to the next level with their estimating and how to show my management solid numbers on progress.

This year I’ll be about 50% dedicated to writing code, instead of my normal 10%, the novelty of wading in and fixing problems hasn’t worn off yet – I fixed another extract file (with help) and am about finished with a second file.

My big accomplishment?! I successfully distanced myself from someone else’s freakout, stayed on message and didn’t let it bother me (too much).

Three Things I’m Grateful For

Zicam and Airborne; my floor has been a breeding ground for some entirely nasty set of upper respiratory germs the past month or so and I succumbed entirely over the weekend BUT it really wasn’t that bad and I give credit to all the preloading I did to my immune system.

I don’t often think about how awesome the Hootsuite interface is, I’ve been using it for years now and am on the free version mostly because I don’t do a heck of a lot with it BUT it does save me time and effort and is a consistently stable tool.

One Thing I’ve Learned

In BI the only thing more commonly used than date functions are unions. This week I brushed up on the other operators (again) in this set – except and intersect. If you’re comparing or joining results sets here is a great overview of what you can do with these T-SQL commands – SQL and ME