tfnico's blog

This is a pattern I've been applying for the last five years, ever since company wiki became the standard at my workplace. At some point I added it as an agile practice to the Cantara wiki , and named it "The Diary". However, I always end up calling it Worklog in practice. It's a bit of a GTD technique, with some positive side-effects. Basically, on a day-to-day basis, write down what you're working on in a wiki page. -------------- 2010-10-04 - Fix the funky registration bug - Bug tracker id #18355.  -------------- 2010-10-05 - Still the funky registration bug - Jason committed a fix in r8040, but it didn't work. Writing unit-test. ------------- 2010-10-06 - Knowledge meeting - Awesome stuff. Remember to upload the presentation to wiki. - Registration bug - Resolved task. Talked to Jason and product owner, done-deal. ------------- Keep focused I'm an easily distracted person. I'd be working with something, get side-trekked by a build-break,...

I'm quite busy these days doing preperations for *a big change in my life* that will be the subject of my next blog-post , but I figured I'd give a quick status update that's a bit too big for my twitter stream . I was recently appointed to lead Objectware's Java-department's focus group on Agile . We've been doing agile for a long while on the company level, but it's first now that our department has its own group on it. My goal is to nurture it to being a very active micro-community that will produce knowledge both internally and externally. Much like we already did, but now with more, well, budget :) Our first accomplishment was to attend the Smidig 2008 conference with a respectable amount of Objectware speakers . There were alot of interesting discussions going on in the succeeding open spaces, my favourite topics incuded some hard-core web-testing (of course), when (not to) re-use and some others I can't remember right now. As part of my new ...

This post is going to a bit about what I've been doing lately. Well, like any other developer I've been mostly busy with getting the projects released before the big July. But I've also been past-timing a bit on setting up a new wiki. Yay, I don't have to be the wiki techie any more! It's been well over a year since I started managing Objectware's Confluence installation . As expected, it was very little work. Confluence basically runs itself once it's set up. Mostly it was upgrading, administering content (deleting and cleaning), doing the odd restart or log-watching. Eventually, after a year or so, the hosting of the wiki was outsourced to a nearby hosting company, cause our instance's database was starting to run a bit slow, and my billing rates were a bit high (hey, I'm a consultant, after all) :) So good riddance, finally no more booring IT-support work. Or do I... Well, not until two months later, anyway. I was asked by a colleague, who's ...

I was recently contacted by Atlassian's Wiki Evangelist (yes, appearantly that's a real title!), Stewart Mader. He asked me to consider their new site, Wikipatterns.com , and also forward the site to my dear readership. Done! In other but related news, I've been (somewhat unwillingly) appointed our next Confluence administrator. This means I'll be given full control over the wiki (muhuhaha) , meaning in effect I'll be able to try out new plug-ins, manage spaces, bully people around, etc. It also means I'll have to do upgrades, booring user adminstration, figure out funky stacktraces that are appearing in Confluence for some odd reason, fix the database, etc, etc. The main reason I have volunteered to do this job is that no-one else wanted to do it, and I believe our Wiki is far too critical to leave in the hands of our IT service provider like our CTO would've had it. When are you people gonna understand that Windows is not meant for hosting? Additionally, ...

This tuesday I'm going to do a workshop on wiki for some people in management/business development department. We've been smart enough to choose Confluence for our internal wiki, and its use has been growing steadily ever since last summer, bout the same time as I joined the company. Over this time I've managed to earn the rep of a wiki-evangelist within the company. This is probably I've taken the time to learn the in's and out's of Confluence content formatting, making pretty layouts with columns and tables, galleries, RSS-feeds, and intranet blogging. Some people think I spend too much time fiddling around with it (see for instance the screenshot of my personal space page), but I think it's fun and interesting to try out. I'm not doing it to evangelize the whole company into going crazy on wiki-usage, I just use the wiki to cover my own butt mostly. If I didn't write things down in the wiki, I'd very quickly fall into the state of corporate ...