Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve never worked on a team that really used an agile process. Some claimed they did but they only went so far as to use it as an excuse to not plan. This new team follows a variation on Kanban that is being developed by another manager in our org, Brent. It’s spreading pretty quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a book written about it in the future.

I first heard about Kanban when I was an intern at John Deere in 2001. They used it on their factory flow to reduce the amount of money tied up in logistics. Applying it to software is similar: keep your total work in progress as low as possible. I won’t go into all the details here. If you really want to learn more, you can read Brent’s blog. (One of his most popular posts is how he implemented this with his kids for chores.) He has also started a podcast called AB Testing. But anyway, here are a few keys to how the system works:

• Every piece of work done by the team is represented by a ticket on the board.
• No ticket should take longer than two weeks to finish. All tasks should be trimmed down until they fit into this time window.
• All tasks move through these phases: Backlog > Ready > Analyze > Engineer > Code Review > Release > Customer Validation > Done. Backlog is the list of work that the team could do, Ready is a small number of tickets that the manager says should come next and the rest of the phases are a little more self-explanatory. There are specific criteria for exiting each stage and every ticket goes through every stage.
• Lightweight documentation is created in the Analyze phase to give background on the issue, clearly define scope and agree upon what “Done” looks like.
• Each phase has a limit on the number of tickets that can be in the phase at one time. There’s also an overall limit to how many tickets can be in flight in total for the whole team.
• Morning team standup meetings focus around what you need to do to get your ticket into the next phase and who can help you, NOT a status report of what you’ve been doing.
• When you finish a ticket, you don’t pick up a new one until you go through every other ticket and ask if you can help move the ticket along.
• There are special ways to track high priority issues and requests from outside the system.

it seems a little complicated at first, but once you get into it, it’s liberating! Here are some of the things I love about it:

• Coming on to a new team, this really helps you ramp up. Everyone is encouraged to work with someone else on every ticket. Solo tickets are not the norm. That means you can hop in with someone else and start learning about their area.
• You’re encouraged to pick up tickets from all areas that the team owns, not just your comfort zone. It’s a bit inefficient at first, but after a couple months, you have a team full of people that really can fill in for each other.
• At most, you have two tickets on the board at one time. Imagine only having TWO things to work on! You can focus and pound them out instead of constantly task switching.
• There is ALWAYS help available. The whole system focuses on really working as a team and moving the tickets through the system.
• It’s very clear how much work is getting done and how long it’s taking. Inefficiencies or choke points quickly bubble to the top to be addressed.
• This seems to avoid the slow buildup of responsibilities over time that you get as you stay in a group longer and longer. If you’re doing work, it’s on the board. And if it’s visible, it’s less likely to be stuff that builds up. The team will see it and find reduce the cost of those taxes.

This system has made it very enjoyable to ramp up with the new team, see the contributions I’m making, and focus on one or two very specific and well-defined tasks.

I don’t remember the first time that Dad and I found the Red Green Show, but we spent a lot of time together watching it. One episode that really cracked us up was when Harold read a letter from a reader with a broken keyboard. The O and the E were reversed. This all happened before everything was on the internet so I didn’t know what episode number it was or anything like that.

Thankfully now every episode of the Red Green Show is available (legally!) on YouTube. That still didn’t help me much though because there are hundreds of episodes to sift through. Then I found this page that lists out the subject of the “Male Call” segment of the show! Sure enough, it says that in the episode “Homemade Cheese” a reader writes a letter with a broken keyboard!

I found the episode on YouTube. Here it is for your enjoyment. The segment starts at the 19:06 mark.

Happy Fourth! Here are some fun trivia facts to annoy your friends and family:

• John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe all died on the Fourth of July.
• Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July.
• Most people didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence until August 2, 1776.
• The final signature on the Declaration of Independence didn’t come until January of 1777 when Thomas McKean put his name on it.
• 31 places in the US have “Liberty” in their name. Iowa has the most with 4.
• 1 in 6 backyard BBQs contains meat from Texas.
• Though we fought them for independence, Britain is now our 6th leading trade partner.

Yes, I know the plural of Lego is Lego, but in my world, the plural is Legos. Deal with it. The other way sounds too pretentious. It’s like calling that fancy sports car a “Porsch-uhhhhh.”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the price of Lego pieces (see what I did there?) There are entire websites devoted to the economics of Lego sets. One good example is brickpicker.com. There are also some great breakdowns of the average price per piece by year and also by Lego genre. My parents will notice that when they were buying me lots of Legos, prices were coming down from their peak of $0.40/piece. Note that these numbers DO account for inflation. Today, a good rule of thumb is $0.10/piece is a good deal. Some sets can still be quite a bit more than this.

When you’re buying used Legos at a garage sale or thrift store, it’s probably easier to think in terms of weight. Advice varies a bit here, but in general if you shoot for $5-7/pound, you’re getting a pretty good deal.

Tyla shops at our local thrift stores pretty regularly to find clothes and toys for Elijah. I went with her once and was excited to see a small bag of Legos for sale. Ever since then, she’s been on the lookout and has had some small scores. Last week she sent me a photo of an entire wall of bags of Legos! We had a hard time deciding how much was “too much”, but it was such a good deal, we didn’t want to miss out. She ended up grabbing twenty bags for about $75.

The total haul weighed in at 14.5 pounds which puts us at $5.17/pound. I counted out a sample of the bricks, weighed the sample and then estimated that she bought about 5500 pieces for a price of 1.4 cents/piece.

The only way this wasn’t a good deal was if Elijah doesn’t like to play with Legos. But even if that happens, we could sell this for a profit. Combined with my Legos that are still in Indiana, he’s going to have an incredible amount of building options at his fingertips!

At work we have two career tracks: management and individual contributor (IC). It’s a pretty nice setup because you can switch back and forth at will, and the compensation is the same on both tracks. So theoretically you can be an IC that makes as much money as the CEO. You can decide whether your definition of success means climbing the management ladder or becoming a technology expert.

I started my career here as an IC and then moved into the management track about two years later. Now, six years after that, I’m bouncing back over to the IC track. It’s a change that I’ve been pondering for a while, and I jumped on a good opportunity when it appeared. This is really the first big voluntary change that I’ve made at this company so there is a bit of trepidation, but overall, I’m not going that far. I’ll still be working on the Power BI offering, but I won’t be as specifically involved with Power Query. My new role focuses around helping each of the Power BI teams give the best customer experience possible, specifically by giving them the data they need to react to issues with the service and tracking overall metrics to report our service health and usage. It gets me into a lot of big data, data scientist work. It’s new to me, but that’s what keeps work interesting and challenging.

On January 1, I weighed 227.2 pounds. Last Friday, I weighed 201.8. I originally set out to get down to 210 but then decided to get to the point where I was no longer classified as “overweight” according to the government BMI charts. That meant getting under 205. I’m pretty proud of this process because it’s the most weight I’ve ever lost and the longest I’ve stuck with anything like this.

I don’t remember what I weighed when I graduated from college but I think it was right around 210. For most of the years, I fluctuated between 215 and 220. When I hit 227 after the holidays, I knew I needed to make a change and tackle the problem while it was still manageable. Then I kind of got into the groove and just kept going. On the last day of the diet, I woke up and weighed 205.4. Knowing I was so close, I basically starved myself and ended up losing 3 pounds that day. Ha! Obviously I gained some of it back but I declared victory. I’m going to try to keep it under 210 and I think that’s pretty feasible given the improved habits I’ve formed over the last 5.5 months.

Everyone wants to know how I did it. Before I give any answers, I’ll say that this is the diet that worked for me. This is by no means a recommendation for you or a commentary on your choices. That being said, there are two parts to the question: what did I change with my eating and how did I stay motivated?

Eating changes:

• Avoid carbs. I’ve blogged about it before, but carbs are the biological start of generation of fat cells. I was unwilling to cut out carbs completely (I love beer and rum!) but I did scale way back. Most mornings I scramble eggs and throw in onion, sausage or ham, and cheese. It’s a very low carb meal and because I have everything chopped ahead of time, it’s super simple. I also stopped drinking orange juice in the mornings. If you’re doing a truly low carb diet, you should shoot for around 30 grams of carbs per day. One glass of OJ has about that many carbs! I ate a lot more salads at lunch with lots of meat on them and we cooked a lot more low carb dinner recipes. Genaw.com is a great resource for easy low carb recipes that generally taste good. We also stopped buying chips and desserts as an easy way to halt those temptations. I started going to the butcher regularly too so I could buy lots of delicious meat for the grill. All that being said, I still eat lots of carbs. The difference is that now I know when I’m doing it and I can balance it out. Cutting them out completely would have demoralized me and I wouldn’t have stuck with it. I found a balance that worked for me to lose weight but still enjoy some rum and Cokes or a burger with fries.
• Eat less. This is pretty obvious but eating less was a big key to success. More specifically, eating less at dinner is important for me. I can have large (but still relatively healthy) breakfasts and lunches, eat a smaller dinner and still lose weight. To help me eat less at dinner, I store the leftovers before we eat so I won’t be tempted by seconds and we use smaller plates. The upside of eating less is that each meal goes farther reducing the grocery bill and decreasing the number of nights when we have to cook.

That’s pretty much it. Simple, right? There are other things like shopping on the edges of your grocery store (produce, dairy, meat) and avoiding the aisles (processed foods, etc) but in general it all goes back to eating fewer carbs and eating less food. But how did I stay motivated? I’m a geek and I my day job is all about big data, so my motivation was data!

• Fitbit. Our health plan at work gives us some money to buy fitness related items so I picked up a Fitbit at the beginning of the year. It has been a very interesting source of data, but not nearly as helpful in losing weight as I thought it would be. I’ll show a data breakdown in a later post that will explain why.
• Scale. Every single morning, I stepped on a scale. It’s important to weigh yourself at the same point of your day every day because your weight varies dramatically over 24 hours. I’d always weigh myself as soon as I woke up before using the bathroom or eating anything. I logged that weight every day too. That was the biggest single factor in keeping myself accountable and motivated. I knew I had to write down my weight the next day and that I’d be disappointed in myself for splurging on food the day before.

This post is getting very long already so I’ll save the charts and graphs for another day.

A lot of friends and family have told me their losing weight right now. If you add up the weight loss from Don, Tim, Tyla and me over the last 6 months, you’d have over 100 pounds! Each of us is doing it slightly differently, but the results are all good. The “trick” is to define a sustainable plan that provides enough measureable improvement to keep you motivated. Don’t worry about following my plan or someone else’s plan exactly. Chances are, as you go through phases of weight loss, you’ll need to adjust your approach anyway. As long as you’re staying healthy and losing weight then you’re probably doing it right! (Or bonus points if you are already at your goal weight!)

As Tyla and I were discussing yet another public shooting, I made the comment that we shouldn’t get discouraged because this kind of thing has always happened throughout history. The difference is that now we hear about every single instance because of the Internet. When I said that, I was referring to the content of a book called The Better Angels Of Our Nature. The author goes back in history and shows that we’re living in the most peaceful time ever.

But then Tyla said, “What about compared to 10 years ago?” Umm… I don’t know? To the internet we go!

I found crime data for the last 55 years, pulled it into Excel using Power Query and then made a nice chart. I only showed every 5 years so that it would be a little more readable. The answer is yes, the US is a safer place than it was 10 years ago.

This spring has been WET. It’s so wet that even if we didn’t get another drop of rain until August 1, we would still set the record for the wettest February through July ever in Seattle! That’s saying a lot because spring is incredibly wet around here.

Since we started the yard project one week ago, we’ve had 70-75 degree sunshine every single day. It’s mind-boggling how nice the weather has been and how perfectly it lined up with our project. I’m so thankful! Heavy rains would really have changed this project.

I’ve been using Untappd.com for the last 18 months. It has been fun to keep track of all the different beers that I’ve had. While we were sitting in the stands for the Indy 500, I popped the top on my 100th different beer! It was a Schell’s Deer Brand straight from New Ulm, MN. I suppose technically I’ve had more than 100 different beers but I’m not counting any that I drank before I started using the app.

So now that I have all this data, what are the best beers? First I should start by explaining the rating scale that I use:

1. This isn’t what I call beer.
2. If somebody hands me one, I’ll drink it, but I wouldn’t pay for it.
3. If I can’t find #4 or #5, this is a good choice.
4. If I go to buy beer and this is on the shelf, I will almost always choose it.
5. Stockpile this beer! It’s awesome!

I also won’t let a beer get to #5 unless I’ve had it on multiple occasions. Sometimes a beer seems more delicious based on your social situation or the food you’re eating. A 5 star beer should be good any time!

So far, I’ve only given 5 stars to three beers:

• Galley Mac Amber Ale – This is the recipe that we used when we made our own beer. It’s a copy of the Mac & Jack’s African Amber recipe.
• Mac & Jack’s African Amber – The brewery is only a couple miles from work but I’ve never been there. WHY!?
• Deschutes Brewery Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale – This is only made 5 months out of the year so when I see it, I buy a lot of it.

There aretwo more beers that are vying for a spot on the 5-star list:

• Bell’s Brewery Two Hearted Ale. I had it for the first time on this last trip to Indianan and loved it. It’s similar to the Red Chair that is already on the list.
• Hopworks Velvet ESB – I had this in Portland but can’t find it here!

There are lots of four star beers on my list: Fat Tire, Redhook ESB, Alaskan Amber, Double Take Amber, Widmer Hopside Down, 10 Barrell Hop Project #37, Redhook Audible Ale, Anchor Brewing Liberty Ale, Fish Brewing Spire Mountain Cider, Gustav’s Enchantment Ale, Great Lakes Burning River Pale Ale, Left Hand Sawtooth Ale, Gallagher’s Cealidh Wheat, Gallagher’s Hals Celebration, Goose Island Honker’s, Silvery City Ridgetop Red, Pyramid Pale Ale, Manny’s Pale Ale, Hopworks Velvet ESB, Alaskan ESB, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, and Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.

That’s a lot of 4 star beers. I’m thinking I should run through them all again and see if they really are worth of their 4 star rating. Sounds delicious… challenge accepted!

Happy Memorial Day! The first thing that might pop into your mind is beer and barbeques, but don’t forget to thank a veteran today.

Memorial Day has a long history dating back to the 1800s when people would decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. There’s a lot of controversy about exactly how it started, but it was declared an official Federal holiday in 1967. At that point it was moved from always being on May 30 to being the last Monday in May. Can you imagine what would happen if they changed the date of a holiday now?