I took in two channel 9 screencasts (or whatever they call them) today as I was traveling and had some extra time. 

The first was Brian Harry talking about one of my favorite subjects (TFS) - Brian Harry on Team Foundation Server Past, Present, and Future .  It was very cool to hear Brian talk about the evolution of TFS and where they are headed.  He struck me as being a very straight-shooter good guy.  A couple of points from the video that I thought I would point out are

• About 24 minutes in he talks about some details with how they manage source control and some challenges that they have run into including insight into a problem that DevDiv had on their TFS server when doing some large scale integration of Orcas
• About 31 minutes in he gets to what is coming for TFS, VSTS, Orcas, and out in the future

In the p&p screencast - Patterns and Practices - A Team of Thieves I captured the following gems from Ed and Peter that I thought were especially relevant and thought-provoking

• There is no such thing as "best" usually there are "proven" practices and that is what p&p provides
• You have to provide context around your proven practices because the context can change everything when it comes to a practice
• Sometimes people want to know what "not" to do instead of just what to do
• They bring people/customers in and have them use the existing system (early drops) and can change the code "real-time" to address customer concerns or needs
• p&p teams are constituted as some developers, some testers, an architect, project or program manager, and a product manager with the product manager being the customer facing component
• One of their goals with their new space on how they work is to lower the friction of communication

All in all good stuff - I am headed up to Redmond on Friday to visit with some of the team and some other outside customers about VSTS - the agenda looks great including a visit from Sam Guckenheimer  - can't wait!!

Originally I had attributed this to Martin Fowler, but it appears the the primary author is Jason Yip

http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html

We have a virtual team and just had a training forum where every team member reviewed this and then we discussed this in the context of the virtual standup that we have everyday - below are the list of items that we decided to change to make our standup more effective

Standup Improvements

• Actually standup during standup (we conduct it over the phone)
• First person report on big picture (we using MS Team Foundation Server and everyone gets the iteration progress chart daily and we report on it to simulate people looking at our board of storycards etc...)
• Status should be focused to team members and should communicate commitments (we were losing velocity and enthusiasm in the standup by people reporting too long on the wrong things)
• Meeting starts at 11 (we decided not to go with the start of the day deal because of time zone, child care etc...)
• Last Arrival speaks first

http://www.ayende.com/Blog/2007/01/21/TheAntiTeam.aspx

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/01/21/The-Anti-Team.aspx

All of us probably have at least one of the elements described in those post to one degree in another - the key is recognizing it/being aware of it.

http://www.addsimplicity.com/adding_simplicity_an_engi/2006/11/omnipotent_infe.html

The comments even include a comment that is signed by Roy T. Fielding which if him is the MR. REST.

Interesting article on how the king of the PC world handles computer time with his kids.  I wonder what Scoble's opinion is on this subject - I know his son is a little older (but I don't think much from what I have gathered), but he seems to spend quite a bit of time with his Mac.

My opinions are similar to Gates' while a child is young I believe they need to have a variety of experiences with the computer/internet being part of it, but only a part.  My experience has been that kids today seem to be less interested in the outdoors and exploring the "real" world around them and instead are glued to the computer/tv/game console/cell phone (texting) etc... Perhaps they are just reflecting us, their parents, I don't know, but I believe that they need to experience the outdoors as well to appreciate the amazing world around them that they have the blessing to live in.

Link to Gates keeps close eye on kids' computer time | CNET News.com

Good read about similarities between Agile and Skunkworks.

http://www.sstc-online.org/Proceedings/2005/PDFFiles/GLH930.pdf