tfnico's blog

This is a post going into the usefulness of live voice-chat tools in distributed teams. If you've ever seen the Leeeeeroooooyy Jeeeenkiiins video of World of Warcraft fame, you've heard this kind of tool in action. It's how the participants in the video are speaking with each other - this is not a feature built into the World of Warcraft game - it's a separate team-oriented VoIP software, and it's all about letting gamers communicate orally while gaming.  Since these tools are for gamers, they have to be fast (low latency) light (as not to steal CPU-cycles from heavy games graphics)  moderate in bandwidth usage (as not to affect the game server connection) There are several options around: TeamSpeak , Ventrilo , more recently the massively grown Discord , and finally Mumble , which is the open-source alternative of the gang. A few years ago, when I joined eyeo (a distributed company), several of the operations team were avid gamers, and had a TeamSp...

Last year, I came across an awesome free resource for learning mediation and as part of that, empathic listening. As I blogged about at the time , Gregorio Billikopf 's audio seminar "Listening First Aid: An Empathic Approach" provided me some very useful knowledge, not only for conflict mediation, but for every day life: Listening is obviously a huge part of how we operate socially, and becoming better at it is something that not many think about, although it is sorely needed for many. "Engaging Conversation" by Michael Coghlan licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 Naturally, I was keen on letting others in on Gregorio's resources, but the website where the audio seminar is hosted only offers a single zip file download containing the mp3 files, and a slow download at that. In this day and age where everything can be but a click away for attention, I figured it would be worthwhile making this content more accessible. I sent Gregorio an email to ask if he was in...

Recently, I signed up for doing an internal talk about roadmaps, and what they are generally all about. I figured this post would be a good start to get myself into crystallizing the message up front. Keeping in mind, roadmaps are but one component in an extremely complex domain involving many sciences, so this is one of those scratching-the-surface-posts. Who's saying what out there Before we start inventing our own wheels, it's nice to review what is the state of roadmaps out there. Perhaps there is some "industry best practice" ;) So I'll begin by collecting information from the first, best sources I know about. I happen to follow a couple of product management authorities on Twitter: Melissa Perri and John Cutler . Then recently, our internal head of product recently pointed out Roman Pichler . Finally, there's the venerable Marty Cagan who I reckoned has written a thing or two about roadmaps, and that was indeed the case. Note that each of ...