Musical.ly got merged into TikTok once ByteDance owned both things.

I get the impression that Musical.ly was the bigger half.

Get at the control panel in Windows XP.

There is probably a link directly under the main menu that materializes from the start button at the lower left.

the Google Hangout game

1. https://accounts.google.com/SignUp will let you make a Google account
2. https://hangouts.google.com/ will let you make a hangout
3. click the + at the upperright to add someone by gmail address

pseudoSXSW

I am between jobs (hopefully) and I was going to indulge a vacation I had planned. Before I ever drove out of Minnesota, I knew that SXSW had been cancelled due to COVID-19 and thus my chance to again see Kælan Mikla in America where they seem not to return to since becoming my favorite band was dashed, but my mother and sister and a friend of mine live in Austin, Texas so I went to Austin, Texas on vacation nonetheless. The entire time I was there things tightened up more and more. I attempted to go to four tech talks when in Rome, but only half of them panned out, specifically this one and this one. ADNUG became a webinar and another talk on Amazon SageMaker, an AWS cloud-based machine learning platform, was just outright cancelled. I ran into Sogeti cellmate Matt Hinze at an HEB (a grocery store named for a Howard E. Butt Sr. wherein the E stands for Edward) and made safe pleasantries with him. I arrived early and just stayed at my mother's house and then left before the Hampton hotel room reservation kicked in. I got the pleasant surprise of the Hampton agreeing to refund my nonrefundable room reservation given the extreme circumstances. Supposedly I am going to get my money back at some point this week just as I am supposedly going to start a new job on the 23rd of this month. We shall see, eh? In wandering around the convention center where I could have otherwise picked up my badge for SXSW, I took the photo here which now seems comic. The convention center was a ghost town. The mail from SXSW so far is baiting me to roll my reservation forward to the next year or maybe two years ahead, etc. I did not take my laptop with me to Austin and back and I am just now typing up some notes I took. Things I made dirty scribbles to remember for this blog include Figma, a collaborative design tool, and befunky.com, an online Photoshop of sorts. zebra.com is a performance monitoring tool. If you zoom in on your iPhone to take a picture, when you try to get that photo onto your PC and open it in Photoshop, Photoshop may squawk in denial at the image per my mother. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's three laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third of the three is mentioned in this (Did you know there was a She-Ra reboot? I only know because I ate at Sonic on this trip. Sonic has the toys.), and it sounded a lot to me like Frank Pasquale's prediction that our own technology will become what might as well be magic. On my iPhone X, running 12.4.1 for the software version, when I go to unlock my phone there is a flashlight icon at the lower left. If you press it, it does nothing until you unlock your phone and then the flashlight comes on. I do not yet know of the right way to turn the flashlight back off, but if you just power your phone down and then back up that kills the flashlight. Emily Weiss is the founder/CEO (chief executive officer as opposed to COO or chief operations officer, CTO or chief technology officer, or CFO chief financial officer) of Glossier which does cosmetics. Mozy was bought out by Carbonite. KOA is the Kampground of America with the campground part spelled with a K. "Linux on IBM Z" might be the name that came to be for IBM's Linux. My mother mentioned that before she got the axe in 2002 that this was the thing that she was working on closest to the end of her 33 years at big blue. Z stands for zero downtime. My mother couldn't tell me what the name ended up being for the thing she got cut from so I am guessing a bit here. PoF stands for Plenty of Fish, a dating app. Enneagram is something like Myers–Briggs. There are nine different personality categories in a wheel and you are constantly moving from one to another in life although some go faster than I others I bet. DHL is named for Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom, and Robert Lynn and is a logistics/shipping company out of Germany. It is a GmbH which stands for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung translating to "company with limited liability" per Wikipedia and being in form like an American LLC (limited liability company) or the British "Ltd." for just limited, I guess. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it allows some leniency for access to copyrighted works by forbidding some blockades. The .NET Foundation supports the building of open source software in .NET. OpenCart is an open source shopping cart of some sort. AutoML stands for automatic machine learning and has some helpful gunk for picking models for machine learning. Bolt On Technology is some tech for auto shops. Smartsheet is some better way to do spreadsheets.

On Friday the 13th I saw Jim Brisson lead a discussion on Lean.

The event was at Inventive in Austin, Texas and this was a SIG as a part of Agile Austin that happened over the lunch hour. More specifically, this was a Lean Coffee meeting which is an informal meeting with a flexible agenda in which the participants vote up what they want to talk about. Jim Brisson is the Agile coach at Dell, but he did not define the agenda. We the crowd did that. Lean is different from Agility. One is either Lean or Agile and one does Kanban with Lean or Scrum with Agile. I have long been appalled with the ScrumBut of Scrumban in which a team estimates points not to show a burn down chart and a hey-we-cannot-get-everything-in-guys mindset but instead to just try to fill a sprint with gunk to do short term. It was pointed out to me in this session that maybe this isn't so bad. This came up under the guise of the question "How do we talk a business into Lean?" and the pain point seemed to be that so many characters in the sea, project managers and the like, rely on time. The counterargument that Scrum isn't better because the estimates for size (time) are always flawed may be a reality that is often lost on such persons, so why not just do pseudoscrum for them? Maybe it is not the end of the world. The argument to be made, if you want to argue for Kanban, is to argue for continuous improvement. WIP stands for work in progress and work in progress limits differ from lead time (a.k.a. cycle time) which is a measure of how much raw time it took for any one card (we kept calling them Chiclets) to progress from left to right on the Kanban board. WIP limits represent how many balls you can juggle, i.e. how many cards may be on the Kanban board at one time. The WIP limit should be less than the number of developers and that should give you some wiggle room to adjust for surprises. In waterfall one has huge batches which arguably become sprints in the miniwaterfalls of Agile. In Lean throughput is the measurement of velocity. Little's Law, named for a John Little, defines WIP as throughput multiplied by lead time. VSM (value stream mapping) defines the hops on a Kanban board that a card must go through. The VSM process is really for the business people to see to get them involved. Anytime you apply words to you actions ("Lean") those listening tend to focus on the word and not the action so the visual of the board would help therein. It gets people out of working in knowledge silos on, well, development in silos. When you "expedite" in Lean it breaks all WIP limit boundaries. You should not expedite more than one thing at a time and you should use expedite to fight fires. An MVP (minimal viable product) is for seeing if an idea is good (think prototype) more than making an actual product. In a J Curve productivity goes down at first before it eventually swings back up. You dive into a J Curve in doing something new and if you are to dive into J Curve after J Curve the curves need to be spaced far enough apart for you to be up on the chart past the starting point before dipping down anew in a new curve.

I saw Max Ekesi speak on what he feels makes for good Agile as a part of the Agile Austin Featured Speaker Series on the tenth of March.

Maximilian Ekesi is pictured here with Kassandra K. Cardenas, the current chief product officer for Agile Austin of which the Agile Austin Featured Speaker Series is an offering. The event was hosted at Kasasa in Austin, Texas and Kasasa does some sort of banking-based tech. Max wants you to cook up an Agile process that is customized to your team, and, to that end, he walked us through what he described as his twenty year history, though it looked like nineteen years to me, and spoke to its pain points. He started at Dell in 2001 (did you know that dell.com was the first shopping cart site to do a million dollars of business in one day?) and then moved on to GM (General Motors) and finally landed at Whole Foods which is now owned by Amazon. He admitted that while he was at Dell and GM that he felt most energized about Agile when he would visit an Agile Austin talk and compare notes with other individuals excited about Agile. The problem as it turned out with both Dell and GM was the businesses themselves and he offered the Peter Drucker (a consultant) quote: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." At either Dell or GM, I'm not sure which, Max was told to increase productivity by ten percent and he vented about the obsession over metrics which can always be skewed suit-to-purpose. I think he pushed back in that circumstance that he would first have to measure what was to find a baseline. "DRiVE" by Daniel H. Pink was put up on a pedestal as a pretty good book by Max and he argued that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are desired by knowledge workers per that book. Max feels that co-location is important and that a team should not be half split between say America and India. He also feels it is best to interact with the business owners and did not speak kindly of Michael Dell and his posse walling themselves off from development in their own little building in Round Rock where average Joe worker bee isn't allowed to go. At Whole Foods, the dev and the business sit on two adjacent floors of the same building! Max felt that teams should be end-to-end teams and not, for example, a few devs who have to argue for the testing team to allot them a resource for a spell. Instead, a team will just have devs, a tester, a project manager, and support and development DevOps characters rolled up into it. The teams are thought of as two pizza teams in that you may feed the teams with two pizzas and these two pizza teams are given autonomy to conduct their own affairs. One of the ways there is a break with autonomy however is that all teams have to follow a common cadence and there is a somewhat centralized roadmap. I suppose sprints fill a PI (program increment) and eventually it was decided that quarters of the year made for the best PI shapes. There are organizational meetings across all teams to announce intentions for a PI per team. Whole Foods is kind of chilled out, but presenters in the meetings I just mentioned have incentive to deliver as they presented and there are also financial rewards for teams that deliver. A few random things: Jeff Lomax was an attendee for this event and in spotting him I was able to put a last name with the name "Jeff" as suggested here. LeSS, with just the e in lowercase, stands for Large-Scale Scrum and is a framework for scaling Scrum up, big time. Max Ekesi is pictured here showing off a list of little splinters for different canned ways to approach Agile:

"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein seems to be the book the Agile Austin book club is chewing through. Max stressed that there is not enough disruption in Austin, not like the wild madness of California tech. Chimp is an internal chat app that Amazon peddles to its own and Amazon also made its own cameras for its check-yourself-out stores.

South by Southwest has been cancelled due to the coronavirus!

no SXSW!