Mik Kersten – Project to Product

An addition to the more lyrical and tactically oriented DevOps foundation books from Gene Kim, this book presents a method to scale agile in large organizations.

Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework, a way of linking product development planning, the activities around product development and the integration of supporting tools.

The different types of “flows” (work that must be done do improve the product – my words) that Kersten identifies are Features, Defects, Risks and Technical Debts. Flows must attribute to some business result, whether improved product value, cost (reduction), better quality or customer happiness.

Martin Parr booklet by Phaidon

The small book “Martin Parr” from Phaidon has a relatively extensive introduction (I mean: for such a small book) to the work of Martin Parr. We see how he develops from a black and white photographer of British life into the critical flash & color photographer of life’s peculiarities as we know him today. 

The book  furthermore is a guide to how you can read a picture. Maybe a bit over the top now and then:

… the picture recalls Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne sprouting leaves and branches… (picture of girl on school party).

It must also refer to the psychological complexity of attending school”(boy with mother a grammar school).

Wonderful pictures of a stuffed owl, sausages, a cup of tea, and many other ordinary objects and scenes depicted in Parr’s unique manner.

Cool tools – anything you need

The cool-tools website makes many tools review sites superfluous.

I stumbled upon the YouTube channel from Mark Frauenfelder, Editor In Chief of the Cool-Tools website and had great fun watching the video they made of the first podcast. 

The Cool Tools initiative has a website, podcast and Youtube channel. It is just fantastically nerdy. Watch the semi-scientific comparison between the Bernzomatic TS4000 vs. TS8000 and other great videos.

New skills

I am hiring, and because this is new to me, I researched a bit how companies are recruiting nowadays, and where (Indeed seems to be the incumbent).

Going through the job description I noticed how many skills requirements drastically limit their target audience by including long lists of technologies and tools. I gathered the following list from just a handful of job descriptions:

Rundeck, Jira, Jenkins, UrbanCode, ServiceNow, Git(hub), Python, Flask, Bootstrap, PHP, Golang, Ansible, React, Angular, Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, HTML5, Java, Node.js, CSS, R, AWS, Sonar, Fortity, Polymer/Lit, Hadoop, Elastic.

Sites list these technologies as prerequisites. This will put off very good people that just have not acquired a specific tool-skill yet. On the other hand very good people that have too much of a preference for the latest and hottest tool, may be put off by these specific tech lists.

More importantly, the variety in the list above seems to imply that tools are not as important a skills as the eagerness and ability to quickly learn new skills and tools. And also it warns you that if your skills are too narrowly based on specific tools, you may be sailing in shallow water.

The Human Capital Trends 2019 report from Deloitte similarly predicts a future of jobs where new skills needs “are forcing organizations to create more flexible and evolving, less rigidly defined positions and roles”.

We will need to learn lots of skills and tools. But we only know which ones, when it happens.