Recently I had few interviews with graphic designers. This was definitely outside my comfort zone because my knowledge of the topic is… well, very limited. However, my task wasn’t to check their graphic skills. This was already done by my colleagues. My task was to get to know them better. To see whether they “fit…
Author: Tomek Kaczanowski
Explaining Programming to 6 Years Old Kids
The task: explain what you do at work to a group of 6 years old kids. Level: high (my own daughter was among the kids). Many people shared their ideas of such “lectures” – you can find some really interesting examples on Stack Overflow (e.g. here). Many of them are based on the idea of presenting…
ACE! 2016
My findings from the 7th ACE! conference (Krakow, Poland). They say that “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” So maybe I was ready, and ACE! appeared in the right moment to teach me a gazillion of things. Frankly, I can’t remember any other event that I finished with so many new pointers, new…
Shit Umbrella
Recently I had an opportunity to meet some people working in big corporations. One of the things we discussed was role of leader/manager. They used the term “shit umbrella” to describe the role of such person. If you are unfamiliar with the term, here is the definition from urban dictionary: It’s the unofficial title for…
Rules For Meetings
The Internet is full of “10 Rules For Effective Meetings” blog posts so why not create my own? Sure, why not? These are the guidelines I try to follow when organizing meetings. They work fine for me in the context of the company I work for (flat structure, ~80 people, no managers, no corpo-bullshit). I have…
Notes About Changes
During the Unexpected Meetup: 1st Open Space I had an opportunity to discuss the topic of changes with fellow Scrum Masters / Team Leads / Agile Coaches. Here are some notes (subjective and incomplete): Books to read: Our Iceberg Is Melting More Fearless Change You shouldn’t expect that your team will come with new change proposal…
Me vs. Email – Trying To Reach Inbox Zero
I was addicted to email checking. Or maybe I should say that I still am the same way an alcoholic doesn’t stop being alcoholic, he merely doesn’t drink anymore. So let me say I’m still emailoholic who checks email in controlled manner. Or at least, one who tries to achieve the inbox zero. Checking email often was exhausting,…
Journey Lines – A Team Building Activity
I performed a Journey Lines team building activity (as described by Lyssa Adkins) with various teams. In general, I was really happy how it went (and so were my colleagues). The idea of Journey Lines is that each of the participants draws a line showing ups and downs of previous jobs. Each chart contains also some…
2016 – Year of Self-Retro
It is almost the end of January, but I believe it is still a good time to make some New Year’s resolutions. Today I want to describe one of mine, which I believe could be a good fit for many of us. As you know, it is very simple to make resolutions but much harder…
Card Colors on Kanban Board
There are many ways to organize your kanban (or scrum) boards. One difference is the meaning of colors of cards. Here are some examples of how we can use colors so that the board tells us as much as possible about the current work. Size of task One team I worked with used the following…