Where ya been?

Possibly you’ve been wondering where I’ve been and what is going on with, among other things, the iPad project. Of course, if you follow me on Twitter, you know I’m alive. Anyway, here’s a report.

On the Sunday before Labor Day, I felt very strange, chest pain, panic, I don’t know what. I’d felt that way before and done nothing about it and survived. This time we went to emergency.

Long story short, they did all the easy tests, said I was showing no evidence of a heart attack, but why not do a stress nuclear test anyway, and having nothing else to do and my pants having been taken from me, I said OK. They did that and said “The test was positive”. Turns out positive is not good news. Took me to Ann Arbor and same time next day I had a stent in the Widowmaker artery. Day after, they sent me home with a book-sized pile of paper and a cabinet full of drugs.

By, I don’t know, mid-September. I was in deep depression. Did all the stuff you’re supposed to do, even very briefly tried some drug. Very briefly: I felt it was making me crazy. For some reason, I basically snapped out of it around early December, had good holidays and here we are.

So since early September, I’ve had no desire whatsoever to work on the iPad program, or update this site in any way. Even feeling marvelously good, which I have been since sometime in December, that wasn’t where my attention wanted to go. Home, health, hanging out, drawing, reading. Not this stuff.

Until this week, when I decided OK let’s look at the iPad thing.

Reminding myself as much as you, the basic idea was to allow me to write an article somehow on the iPad, and saving it in Dropbox would trigger a home process to make the web site and move just the right files up to the server. With Tozier’s help and the occasional bit from Chet, we were doing the thing in Ruby, just because. The project has morphed a few times, as we learned more about how to do it and more about what was needed.

This week, Tozier and I spent a morning going over the most recent code, figuring out what was up. In so doing, we discovered that Apple had removed the FTP server from MacOS, found some ways to get it back, installed one. I found that my web site’s passwords had all been changed back last year sometime and they forgot to tell me.

Summing up, we found that we’d need a day or three to get our stuff¹ back together, and a day or three to build what we need out of scraps left lying around and some new scraps that need to be built, to deal with our general learning, and with the need to do something better than FTP.

Another interesting thing happened. Two of my friends/colleagues/pals in the “Agile” space have been releasing some nice simple stuff. I’ll write more about those in another posting.

In the one case, Amitai Schlier is creating a podcast series called “Agile in Three Minutes”, which is just marvelous.

In the other case, Mike Hill published a lovely video. He asked for feedback and advice, or maybe he was just standing there, and I found myself saying not to work on the lovely tool that lets him create the videos, but just to make more videos. The payoff is in the content: the form is good enough.

And, Physician, Heal Thyself, that’s the advice I’m giving myself as well. I have a perfectly good way of writing and publishing material, and I’ll do best, I believe, to put my energy into that.

Thus this little article.

What will I do with that energy? I don’t know, I’m letting the tides take me where they will. Things I might do include but are not limited to:

• Learn to draw better;
• Draw things relating to “Agile” for articles and conferences;
• Go to conferences (deliver:Agile and Agile 2018 at least);
• Write about Dark Scrum and how to avoid it;
• Muse on the Scrum Alliance kicking me off the Certified Trainers and Coaches list;
• Rant ineffectually about certification and the monetization of “Agile”;
• Rave uselessly about “‘Agile’ Transformation”;

And probably a lot more things. Maybe even finish the iPad project but I suspect not. Sunk cost be damned: I don’t need it. If I get to thinking it’s fun, maybe.

Anyway, that’s my report for just now. Stay tuned.