Just to give some context on why I find certain tools more useful than others, I use the command line a lot (and thus I use a keyboard over a mouse). When I am coding, I work on the terminal or a text editor and then I switch to see the results. I don’t need to have multiple screens (like chat + browser + email) simultaneously. A good read on this type of “schedule” is this essay by Paul Graham (of Y-combinator fame): Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule.

So here are the applications I use daily:

Here are the applications I use daily:

• Productivity & Focus
  1. AlfredApp as a replacement for Spotlight. It’s super fast and very very configurable. I use it all the time to launch applications without taking my hands from the keyboard.
  2. Dock. I keep my dock to a minimum set of applications that I start with the mouse, i.e. when I am not coding. Namely the browsers, my IM clients and itunes.
  3. Caffeine. A very small application that prevents your mac from going into sleep mode. Very useful when doing presentations so that your screen doesn’t go dark.
  4. Divvy for window management. It allows me to position windows on my screens with just a simple key combination. I can align windows when I connect my 24″ screen easily, center them, etc.
  5. Spirited Away hides applications that are not in focus automatically after a configurable timeout. Very useful when you have two monitors and need to focus on one. It keeps all your screen uncluttered and allows focus on the task at hand.
  6. Pomodoro is an application that helps you when using the Pomodoro Technique for time management.

• Using different browsers for different things
  1. Chrome: I use this browser as my main browser (for Jira, Confluence, email, etc)
  2. Firefox: I use Firefox mostly as a complement to Chrome.
  3. Safari: can clean and start fresh, flash sites, … can be reseted easily as nothing I use it with is stored in its local settings.

Why? I use different browsers for different tasks. It’s very good when testing things as well, to have a browser that you can reset to its factory settings (delete all cookies, all saved passwords, all history, etc) so that you can be sure that nothing is being cached or is working in a certain way because of previous actions you did.

• Browser related tools
  1. Choosy because I use so many browsers, occasionally I want to open a link with a different browser than the default one. Choosy is a default browser that allows you to select with which browser you want to open a link when you click on it.
  2. Bookmarks. I have bookmark groups for the tools I use most of the time, just a right click and open all is what I do every morning (opens Gmail, Gcal, Jira, Confluence, Harvest, Yammer, etc) so I have all of them opened without having to remember to go to Harvest, etc.

• Keeping the tools clean
  1. CleanMyMac, keeps my mac clean and remove junk files and folders from the system.
  2. iDefrag. You know when you have been using your Mac for a while and after a few months it starts to get slower and slower and slower? Many times that’s due to the way the filesystem stores the bytes on the physical layout of the drive, which fragments files overtime, etc … iDefrag is a pretty heavy duty tool that re-organises the layout of files in your drive and makes the whole system faster by optimising the storage within the HDD.

• Security
  1. 1password absolutely essential tool to securely create random, complex passwords and store them. You can store your 1password keychain file (the database it uses to store its data) on DropBox to have it sync between your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad and other devices you might have. Make sure your 1password passphrase is complex and not easily guessed.
  2. The Firewall settings should be enabled and you should only allow certain apps to access your network.
  3. System Preferences to disable automatic login as the bare minimum, and have a secure password.
  4. Little Snitch in addition to the built-in firewall, I use this program to inform me which programs are trying to make which network connection and limiting access to certain ports and services, especially useful for preventing bad behaviour of applications sending data without your explicit consent.

• Using files and folders:
  1. TotalFinder brings tabs to the native finder, allows a whole host of other features. It makes the finder usable (otherwise it’s not a very usable tool)
  2. DropBox to keep my files sync’ed between multiple machines and devices and as a very crude form of backup.
  3. Transmit the BEST FTP/SFTP and S3 file transfer application out there.

• development tools:
  1. Homebrew the best package manager for Mac OS X, allows me to install Unix software and other things (MongoDB, GPG, etc).
  2. rvm Ruby Version Manager. Need I say more?
  3. Tower an amazing git client for Mac OS X
  4. Kaleidoscope a diff tool for Mac OS X, for file comparisons (beautifully crafted)
  5. pow.cx recently started using it to run my local Ruby apps.

• Editors and colour schemes
  1. Textmate a neat text editor for Mac OS X, has plenty of macros and bundles that make coding simpler
  2. vim the grand-daddy of text editors, is on almost all unix machines.
  3. Solarized is a beautiful colour scheme for terminal and gui applications. I use it on vim and textmate both.

• Miscellaneous
  1. instapaper to save links to read later and archive interesting pages.
  2. RescueTime for tracking what apps I use for how long. It then gives me stats on how much time I’ve spent on Skype, on my text editor, on Gmail, etc
  3. iShowU HD for screencasts.
  4. Skitch for screencapture and annotations.
  5. Fonts: my favorite monospace is inconsolata for terminal
  6. Adobe CS5 Premium subscription for Photoshop, etc
  7. Omnigraffle Professional for drawings, wireframes, etc

• Backups
  1. Automated
     1. time machine, which is the built-in mechanism using a removable drive that I have here at the office. It makes an automated backup every hour. I use a 1TB HDD.
     2. arq for online encrypted backups to S3
  2. Manual
     1. SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone of my main HDD and some external HDD. I use this once a fortnight to make full backups that I can use to recover a failing drive or if my machine would just stop working, I can boot of a super duper copy and keep on working until I have time to send the machine for repairs.

Again, I find these tools very useful in my day to day work and some of them have really changed the way I work, however YMMV. I hope that you find this useful.

I’ve come across a few interesting situations which made me reflect a bit about the correlation between a widely recognised coaching matrix for individuals and how could this be extended to organisations as a whole.

Let’s first start by looking at the goal of an Agile coach:

Your goal is to a grow a productive Agile team that thinks for itself rather than relying on you to lay down the Agile law. “Agile Coaching” by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, 2009 Pragmatic Programmers.

Considering that one of the founding principles of Agile software development is that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” (and also that this seems to be common sense, right?) enabling teams to think for themselves seems like the natural progression.

Now, in large (and small) organisations, the traditional “command and control” method of management has eroded this principle. In particular in software development, the more common approach is to see “development” as one of those steps that happen at the end of a chain of events that starts with clever executives in strategy meetings devising products based on tons of dashboards and metrics, then sending that to a team of business analysts to come up with large functional specification documents, which are then in turn handed over to rooms full of coders to implement them. We have seen over and over again that this mechanistic and believed-to-be-repeatable approach doesn’t work.

So we assume that everyone will be producing better products, delivering more value faster and having more fun doing it just by changing a few things. Constructive-developmental theories, of whatever sort, introduce a few fundamental ideas one of which is that not every change represents development, which is where our job as coaches become very interesting. Change is just the first step towards development :)

Getting back to the point I was trying to make, when introducing changes as a coach, there is a model for individuals based on the skills and will of the people being coached, some call it the “High Low Matrix Coaching Model“. This coaching model states that depending on the motivation and skills of the coached person, you should adapt the coaching style to one of either “direct”, “advise”, “motivate” or “delegate”. I heard about this model a few years back from my friend (and my manager at the time) Didier Elzinga while we both worked together at Rising Sun Pictures (awesome VFX studio BTW). It’s very useful when you are working with small teams or individuals. What happens when you are coaching larger teams and you need to have a coaching style based on the organisation level of maturity (skills and will)?

So, I set myself to read more on organisational maturity (yes, CMMI and the like, which I was already somehow familiar with), as well as psychology of coaching. I was trying to find out if there had already been some research on the topic. It’s hard because when you google for “organisational maturity and coaching models” you get (apart from the suggestion on the american spelling of “organizational” ;-) ) quite a few results around the organisational maturity as referred in the CMM models, which is not really what I was after. I couldn’t find any direct correlation that would help me validate this theory of mine.

In the next few engagements, and some of the ongoing ones, I shall be using this line of thinking and report on the findings.

We live in interesting times! Full of opportunity to do things better!

We are in Barcelona working at a client site and on the way back to our company apartment, we got a bit distracted talking about software and, as we walked down the stairs at the Plaça de Catalunya station, we realised that we were on the wrong platform. We had gone down to the railway station instead of the metro. We walked upstairs and as we tried to exit through, the ticket validation machines didn’t allow us to get out, it displayed “ticket not validated at entry”. Now, we were getting confused since we had purchased our tickets that morning, we had been able to get in. After a couple of tries, we walked towards the station master and quickly explained to him our situation. He looked at us and immediately took two “exit tickets” out of his pocket and told us “yes, that’s normal, you cannot exit in the same station you entered”.

Exit Ticket

Now, someone must have created that rule, right? Mauricio and I could immediately think of many user stories that would see a client exiting from the same station that they entered and we couldn’t understand under which circumstances you wouldn’t want someone to be able to exit (remember we were using a valid ticket that had been accepted to get in and we had a valid ticket when trying to exit through machines). The most amazing thing is that a decision was made to create an exit ticket, print it, modify the systems to accept it, instead of fixing the system. Why would one put such a restrictive rule onto a user that holds a valid ticket?

Our next step is now to try this exit ticket at other stations. Could this be a master exit ticket that allows us to exit from any station? That would be even more interesting :) If you have any ideas about this system and why it’s this way, I would be very interested in your comment.

What we saw was that writing user stories in this format brought the business and technical people together as it wasn’t centered around the technical implementation aspect of the feature or the business jargon. We all learned to “step into the user’s shoes” very quickly and were able to have conversations with a certain formalism were we could understand each other. As a technical person, I had to force myself to think of a feature in terms of how the user was going to be using it and not in terms of its implementation, at least not during the time of writing the user story, which gave me the freedom to decide on the implementation at Sprint planning or during the Sprint itself.

Don’t be fooled by the simple formalism of the user story format, it’s actually very hard to write features down using this approach however the benefits are way more than the effort. Especially having a good set of acceptance criteria (I will describe this in another post) is invaluable!

I can’t really use any of the examples from our client, however I will use the one from Dan North’s article (read it, it’s a very good description of the characteristics of what a good user story looks like) so that you can see how a user story might look like and how self-explanatory it is:

Story: Account Holder withdraws cash
As an Account Holder
I want to withdraw cash from an ATM
So that I can get money when the bank is closed
Scenario 1: Account has sufficient funds
Given the account balance is $100 And the card is valid And the machine
   contains enough money
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should dispense $20 And the account balance should
   be $80 And the card should be returned
Scenario 2: Account has insufficient funds
Given the account balance is $10 And the card is valid And the machine
   contains enough money
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should not dispense any money And the ATM should
   say there are insufficient funds And the account balance should
   be $20 And the card should be returned
Scenario 3: Card has been disabled
Given the card is disabled
When the Account Holder requests $20
Then the ATM should retain the card
And the ATM should say the card has been retained
Scenario 4: The ATM has insufficient funds
...

While doing some research for this post, I found this talk by Martin Fowler and Dan North titled “The Yawning Crevasse of Doom” in which they go over this problem and come to the same conclusion, that “the biggest difficulty we face in software development is the communication between customers/users and the developers”. Now I wish I had seen their presentation before my engagement as it would certainly have helped me with some more concrete arguments (also using a reference like Martin Fowler or Dan North is extremely helpful ;-) ).

Today, I had the privilege of sharing a panel with Alberto Arévalos (Communications Director for Google in LatinAmerica) and Alec Oxenford (Founder of DeRemate.com, DineroMail and OLX amongst others) during the launch of a series of Technology Workshops for NGOs (in Spanish). I was invited by Juan Cruz Mones Cazón who is heading Idealistas.org in Argentina. Google Argentina generously hosted the event and provided snacks and coffee. The talk was all in Spanish of course, which was a challenge in itself as it’s been almost 10 years since I last spoke in front of an audience in my mother tongue language :)

I was asked three questions:

1) How can new technologies help increase the impact of social organisations?

2) How to use the web to involve citizens in social change?

3) Which do you think will be the revolutions to come with new technologies?

I was given only 30 minutes for my talk and the Q&A session. I have to say that I am the only one that followed the format, both Alberto and Alec had more “free flow” interventions (I saw that Google was recording the event so if it appears on GoogleVideo or YouTube, I will link to it). They had very interesting points and made clear to the 60 or so representatives from NGOs that using the web is simpler now than ever with blogs, GoogleApps, AdSense, etc.

I agree, blogs are very simple to set up and allow NGOs to give their own voice to their message and to also give voice to the voiceless, their consituencies, and more.

Technorati had, in their latest “State of the Blogosphere 2008” numbers that are mind boggling: 133 million blogs, 900,000 new posts every 24h … With numbers like that, it’s easy for your message to get “lost” in the sea of information, so you need to find additional ways so that it doesn’t happen. NGOs need to participate in groups, forums, social networks that are relevant to the issues they want to address. The ability to reach large numbers of users or focussed groups that are passionate about specific topics is now possible without much effort. A topic often ignored in these discussions though it the issue of language. If you are trying to reach a wide audience to discuss an issue of global impact, let’s say like climate change, you need to reach not just the English speaking audiences but the other main languages on the net, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etc. (for the potential audiences, just look at Phil’s post about his talk and check the numbers he talks about for Chinese or Russian sites).

New technologies are certainly reducing the cost of adoption, especially with GoogleApps, Salesforce or Confluence and other wikis (all have free access or licenses for NGOs and non-profits) so even very small non-profits have now access to tools and applications that were previously only available to the largest ones or companies.

New technologies are not only used to convey your message, they are also used to strengthen the democratic process. I made a specific reference to OpenAustralia, a project started by my good friend Matthew Landauer. OpenAustralia is a non-partisan website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament. Bringing transparency to the work of Parliament is fundamental in a democratic process and this is an example on how technology enables citizens and organizations to be able to understand what their representatives are doing on their behalf. And get historical information about their positions on any topic that got discussed in Parliament. BTW all the source code for OpenAustralia is free and open source.

Finally, on the topic of the next revolutions, I can’t dissociate the revolutions from the challenges that we will face with new technologies and I couldn’t focus exclusively on web/software as there are some very challenging new times ahead in the area of synthetic biology. I am certainly not an expert in this field however I can clearly see the ethical challenges that we face in this rapidely evolving field and I was pleased to see how some scientists are getting inspiration from the software movement, in particular the open source one.

The issue of privacy (already recognise through habeas data in certain countries) in a more and more interconnected and digital world is certainly something that the civil society has an enormous amount to contribute to.

I think it’s evident that mobile platforms like Android or the iPhone are already revolutionising how people communicate, how people interact and how people shop however I thought it was important to mention it.

It was a very interesting session (IMHO) and the mentions of OpenAustralia and Open Source drew the most attention. I believe that civil society and NGOs need to get more involved and make better use of the amazing new opportunities that are out there and it’s our job, as technologists, to help them understand what they can do with all these possibilities.

The picture of his taskboard is absolutely fantastic! It conveys an enormous amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way, has all the metrics up there, on plain sight. I think we can learn a lot from it and from there, see how we can apply it to our work with our partner X-Minds and our clients. Remote working is very different and we can learn and do something new and innovative :) It’s a completely different ball-game when your team is widely distributed and finding out what works in co-located teams is a very valuable experience on which to build.