Last week was big for crypto. The Coinbase IPO happened and the whole world seemed to wake up in recognition of crypto as an asset class. While this is a major step in the legitimization of the space, some even calling it crypto’s ’Netscape moment’, I want to take the opportunity to highlight the dangers of crypto going mainstream.
The United States is woefully behind in the crypto economy in every conceivable measure. For Bitcoin PoW blockchain, the U.S. represents a mere 7% of the global hash rate while China represents approx. 65%. This has lead thinkers like Peter Thiel…
This year’s Agile 2021 conference was a special one in several ways. Firstly, it marked the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Secondly, because it came on the heels of one of the world’s most unexpected and unprecedented events, a global pandemic and lockdown. This also meant that the Agile conference was 100% online, and for a community of practitioners that prides itself on face-to-face communication but also in responding to unexpected change, this made for interesting conversations and some self-reflection.
While many of the talks were good, especially the ones related to remote work and delivery metrics, others were…
It is a universal experience for people to love cars. They’re status symbols, they’re fun, they’re cool, and they’re useful. As a young boy, I had a poster of a Lamborghini on my wall, and second, only to Wolverine claws, was what I dreamed of having someday.
With the creation of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, the world has seen the most profitable investment entity in all of recorded human history. It’s even a common meme in crypto circles to simply ask “when Lambo?” when inquiring about the potential profitability of a position or particular token. It’s the vision of…
There have been several distinct evolutions of the crypto space. The genesis was Bitcoin, the first of its kind decentralized digital currency. The second was Ethereum which enabled fully programmable digital assets and smart contracts. Then came decentralized exchanges (AMMs), decentralized finance (Defi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
We have yet another evolution taking place right now with the emergence of decentralizing autonomous organizations (DAOs) and they are making the coordination of decentralized groups possible. To say that the DAO space is exploding would be an understatement. …
In contrast to the current landscape of consultants and a disparate hodgepodge of agile reporting metrics, I want to lay out a clear, succinct, and effective strategy for measuring and optimizing an agile program's delivery process. There are five main charts (a collection of associated metrics) that should drive its delivery process. We’ll look at each in logical order.
The first point to be made before getting into the details is that these charts should be real-time and publicly visible. If they are not seen or can’t be used for self-correction then they won’t be effective tools for change. This…
Blockchain is the technology on which Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are built. Much of the talk around this technology revolves around speculation and making fast money. Because of this many scams have been pulled and this has, in turn, led many people to discount the entire technology as unnecessary and as even a scam itself. In fact, my favorite place for tech news for over a decade has been Hacker News but you will find nearly all the comments on all articles related to blockchain technology completely dismissive of it. It was pretty shocking to me when I first…
Like many others, my first exposure to Agile was through Scrum and the dominant method of planning and forecasting involved story points and velocity. From the beginning, like many as well, I had difficulty understanding exactly how story points worked and why time, in the form of days, wasn’t being used to estimate. I also struggled to discover ways to help teams meet Sprint goals and found it difficult to estimate releases that contained a large number of unestimated issues. The entire approach seemed far less sophisticated than the work being delivered. In the remainder of this post, I want…
There is a global revolution happening right now and it’s happening so fast that unless you are explicitly told about it, it will very likely remain entirely invisible to you. The only inklings you may have that something is happening is headlines mentioning Bitcoin and another COVID-19 stimulus package. This revolution didn’t start this year or even last but it has accelerated so dramatically the past three months that it is clear that we have approached a tipping point. This global revolution that I speak of concerns the very nature and mechanics of the worldwide economy. This revolution is being…
In my previous posts in this series, I talked about the motivation and the rationale behind using GitHub as a backend for writing. To summarize the motivation, consider the following:
- GitHub represents a familiar and cloud-based interface
- GitHub has precise collaboration mechanisms
- This approach is consistent with the increasingly integrated relationship between content and code
- Mechanisms for the precise measurement of contribution and editorial changes are in place
To add to all this, I read several books last year that profoundly impacted my view of how important habits are. Between Deep Work, Atomic Habits, and The Compound Effect, I set…
Everything is a Story
As humans, we are primed at the deepest levels to listen to and tell stories. We create movies, television shows, write novels, and sit around the dinner table telling each other stories about our day. It goes even deeper than that. It’s said that even startups rise or fall on the quality of the story behind the business venture. We even frame the whole way we deliver software products around user capabilities described in “User Stories”. So it should come with little surprise that all the major social media platforms have organized around the story format…
