TeamCity Integration

     

Over the last couple sprints I’ve become my team’s informal DevOps subject matter expert. This was because we needed to implement Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery we were fairly low on the backlog of our Company’s formal DevOps team. Over the course of teaching myself how GitHub, TeamCity, Slack, and HockeyApp can all plug into one another I wrote a pretty handy little tutorial. Enjoy. TeamCity Installation The guide below is based on the TeamCity Documentation.

After Action Review (AAR)

     

In the Army we conducted a formal retrospective after every operation that we completed, called an After Action Review (AAR). Books like Outliershave found such rituals to be extraordinarily important to skills mastery. In the work, Malcolm Gladwell posits that it takes at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to cultivate a world-class skill. Part of deliberate practice is performing a critical review of performance after every session, essentially an AAR.

Missing the Target

     

Well, my monthly objectives shifted again before I was able to fully realize them. I got pulled off my personal projects by an outside offer to work on an iOS and Android travel app in my spare time. I’m sinking a lot of time into it in order to get everything to match the designer’s specifications, but it’s really rewarding to implement something so artfully envisioned. The designer is using https://app.

Steelcase Hajj

     

Last month the majority of the development team in Portland made a business trip to the Steelcase International Headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While we were there we also visited the Steelcase Kentwood Factory. The whole trip really put it into perspective for us. Steelcase itself is over a century old and takes in more than 4.5 billion dollars in annual revenue, employing tens of thousands of employees. Their Kentwood plant (which is only one of five factories) has 3, eight hour shifts working around the clock.

I have arrived...

     

Happy New Year! I realize that I’ve been gone for a bit, but a lot has happened since. I recently got a full time position with Steelcase in Portland, Oregon as a software developer on their new mobile team. The idea is that we’ll be integrating mobile applications with their furniture IoT. IoT stands for “Internet of Things”, which is just a fancy way of summing up everything that’s connected to the internet, from the lowly bluetooth beacons all the way to the vaunted supercomputers of the modern age.