We have just completed a two week exercise with the whole development team to identify, design and estimate the next phase of work. It started as an organic process as we found the best way to do this and then developed into a repeatable process for the latter functionality.

This one is just for future reference for me that I may find useful one day - a website full of resources that may be useful for naming things.

We had a meeting recently with 16 people on the video conference call. Due to poor planning and technical issues it took nearly half an hour to decide to postpone the meeting. That is eight man hours wasted - a whole day of work!

We had a discussion at work about "throw away" code. One of our developers was very against developing any code that would be thrown away afterwards. He referred to this as a waste. In my view sometimes the biggest gain can be in developing code that is meant to be thrown away. It can be used to try things and, more importantly, learn things that can shape the code that is kept. This article sums it up much more eloquently than I can.

I have used the "5 whys" approach multiple times to get to the root of some question. This article advocates adding a time dimension to the decision. Not only should we consider why we are doing something, we should also consider why we are doing something at a specific point in time. It also twists this around and suggests we should consider "What is the danger of not doing this right now?" - what would we lose or miss?

This is an old post (March 2009) that someone retweeted but still holds true on how to work out if an expert is really an expert. It also is a guide how not to fall into common traps that so-called experts fall into.

This is a pretty amazing demonstration of animating an aspect of a 2d photo. This even includes pulling out bodies and animating them moving away from their original scene.

Nearly every technology that has been developed has been used for both good and bad. Developments that look like they could have a massive impact on civilization have usually also spun off a side effect that has a detrimental effect. This could be the latest technologies such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence or older technologies such as the automobile.