You Need to See It

I am currently working on a project for my job that is not going well. Part of the problem is that I was not given explicit instructions on what people wanted. Instead I got instructions to make something better. I sat down and asked questions about specific improvements that people wanted to see. Then I started putting things together so I could solicit feedback.

The first pass went well and people liked the idea of what they saw. That is actually the wrong response. I really needed people to tell me I was headed in the wrong direction or how they thought my ideas could be improved upon. Now we are getting close to the end of the project and I am being asked, "That is all?" Fortunately I still have some time to get things back on track.

Several years ago, I wrote about "Agile Development." The idea is to show something every couple of weeks and constantly ask for feedback. This experience underscores the importance of constantly showing updates. Even though that is what I thought I was doing, I didn't do it well enough as it is only now that stakeholders are coming to me with new ideas about the project.

I don't think the Agile process should be limited to just software development. It could be applied to any job or chore. Think about teaching your children to do dishes or mow the lawn. You don't send them out unsupervised for hours at a time. Instead you periodically check on the work to make sure it is being done correctly. Early in the process is the best time for feedback as the longer you wait, the more fixing needs to be done. Now for my project I just need to figure out how to create the largest flash in the shortest amount of time.

Quarantine

I spend a lot of time in airports and so the Coronavirus is something that is on my mind a lot lately. My company has banned all International travel. My understanding is that this came at the recommendation of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) who recommend eliminating all unessential travel. After thinking about it for a bit, upper management is wondering what the difference is between a flight between a flight from Paris to Rome and a flight from San Francisco to San Diego. They are considering a ban on domestic travel just to be safe.

The international travel ban doesn't really effect me because I didn't have any immediate trips planned. A ban on domestic travel would really be a major inconvenience. I might have to work from home until the ban is lifted . . . maybe it would be kind of nice. I know my wife would appreciate it.

This discussion came up at work along with the various quarantines that are happening at airports and cruise ships. It didn't take long for someone to realize that we offer a solution to the quarantine problem: we work for a video game company. Anyone stuck under what effectively amounts to house arrest will have plenty of time to play video games. It is the perfect cure for not having anything to do. The only downside is that people stuck on cruise ships is not the same demographic of people who enjoy playing video games.

Keeping up with the Novel Coronavirus

As someone that travels a lot, I have been keeping tabs on the Novel Coronavirus (officially known as COVID-19). There is a great deal of fear about the flu and cold-like illness but that is a good thing. It is keeping people vigilant about ensuring it doesn't spread. My own company has gone so far as to ban all international travel. It gets me out of a meeting during one of my vacations and so I not too inconvenienced . . . yet.

Unfortunately there are those that prey upon the unknown and fears of others. The Internet is a wealth of misinformation and lies. Fortunately it is also the best place to go for finding out what is really going on. My favorite place to go is the World Health Organization situation reports. They put one out every day and you can go all the way back to when they first identified the problem. The reports show how many people in the world have the virus (45,171 as of today) as well as how many people have died from it (1,115 as of today). Interestingly the number of daily new cases seems to be going down. I would not say that the world is safe yet, but it is a good trend.

I have heard reports that surgical masks are difficult to purchase. A very recent search on Amazon showed that they still have some for sale so I don't know how much truth there is to those reports. Furthermore if you go back to the WHO situation reports, there are only 13 cases the United States. The only death outside of China is in the Philippines. Personally I think my chance of getting the virus is very small right now, even with all of the air travel I do. However I don't want to sound complacent as my risk could increase seemingly overnight. We still need to remain vigilant and do all we can to keep the illness from spreading. For me that means washing my hands frequently and avoiding contact with people that are starting to show signs of the virus (fever, cough, and shortness of breath according to the Center for Disease Control).

Sneaker-Net to the Rescue

Yesterday I had an online training course to attend. The course used a special plug-in for WebEx and my Mac just didn't want to load it. I borrowed a department laptop and spent several minutes getting it set up for the training course.

The first thing I noticed is that the borrowed laptop didn't have the WiFi network set up correctly. Getting on the corporate network required a trip to our IT department. Since I didn't want to do that, I just got onto our guest network. The only problem is that I couldn't reach any of our internal servers. Since I just needed to get to WebEx this shouldn't have been a serious issue except for the fact that I needed to copy a very lengthy URL from my e-mail to get into the course.

After playing around for a few minutes, I did what I used to do 25 years ago before ubiquitous WiFi: I pulled out portable media. In the past, this used to be a floppy disk but yesterday I used a thumb drive or memory stick. I copied a small text file to the stick from my e-mail laptop and then moved it to the loaner laptop. When it came time to join the training course, I simply copied the URL from the small file and I didn't have to worry about manually typing it into my browser. Once the class ended, I returned the laptop.

There are a number of different solutions to most problems. Sometimes we get so fixated on using new methods that could easily be solved by taking a step back and thinking a bit before acting. In my case, the most elegant solution actually turned out to be what we used to call Sneaker-Net.