How I became a certified Scrum-master in two days...

I'll asume that most readers are somewhat familiar with Agile methodologies. Scrum is one of these, as is eXtreme Programming and Crystal. It is a framework that avoids taking too much control over how you do projects, but adding a few core ideas and rituals that could be of use to any kind organization. If you aren't familiar with Scrum or any other agile method, read up on it now. Here's enough to get you started :

Scrum Alliance's intro

Now, for us that have the privilege of working in a company that can see the long-term benefits of spending a decent fortune sending you off on a two-day course, we kickstarted our Scrum-ways by doing Jens Østergaard's course for becoming certified Scrum-masters (cool title, eh?). It is not an expensive course by itself, but it costs the company alot to take us all of our projects for a whole day (the course was friday and saturday).

Before the course, I honestly figured I knew enough of Scrum to do fine without it, but it would be nice to have the title, and maybe widen horizons a bit.

I'm not going to go through the content of the course, but I can tell you that Jens is an excellent presenter, I learned some Scrum basics I've missed along the way (especially about project roles). I learned a few wise steps to take for introducing Scrum into a project or organization.

I would definitely recommend the course for people who want an introduction to Scrum, and also people who are going to "sell Scrum", meaning getting their customers to accept it instead of horrible traditional project plans. You can read/practice yourself up to the same knowledge (after all, Scrum principles are easy, and mostly it is about using common sense), but this course was a nice compressed version for those who do not have time/resources to educate themselves into Scrummers.

Funny how many of those Agile web-sites seem to be powered by Rails Studio. Pretty clear that the Ruby on Rails community seems fairly connected to the Scrum one. Noticed all those nice urls ;)

One of those little funny coincidences of life; this is a graph over last weeks visits (RSS hits excluded). Look familiar?

But honestly, I can't write any more. Still recovering from yesterday's St. Patrick's Day celebrations.

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config...