Matthew Botos

My pleasure over not needing new regular glasses this year soon faded when I was hit with sticker shock from prescription sunglasses. The Oakley frames I liked weren’t too bad (for Oakleys), but with all the stores only sending the lens orders to Oakley, the prices got rather steep. Enter the Internet, where manufacturer’s suggested prices and exclusive contracts cease to exist.

Buying glasses online is a bit daunting; it’s tough enough to do in person! Though it turns out once you’ve done that once, you can read the sizing information right off your current frames, or try popular brands locally. To get the prescription right, they also require a faxed copy of your prescription, which was reassuring. To top it all off, I even got a phone call to make sure I really wanted sunglass tint before they started cutting the lenses.

In 10 days, I had new sunglasses, with a perfect prescription - faster than some of local labs I’ve dealt with in the past. The whole package came out about 40% cheaper than at the mall, and all I really gave up was a mirror coating. I’d still be a little wary of ordering a style I hadn’t been able to try out in person, but in this case, Frames Direct really delivered,

Netflix picked a perfect movie for me last night: Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary showcasing the photography of Edward Burtynsky as he captures the effects of industrial man on the world and China in particular. As a photographer, it’s great inspiration, especially since I’ve been more absorbed with gear than shooting recently.

While Burtynsky avoids taking sides on the environmental and globalization issues his camera sees, his photos definitely make you think about the environmental damage being concentrated in certain parts of the world. Watching the photographic process behind the scenes, you also see how China and its companies want to project an image of industrial sophistication while still resiting publication of the resulting blemishes. A great subtitle comes across the screen during one of these debates with his between his translator and hosts: “but through his camera, it will look beautiful”.

Another thing that spoke to me personally was how he focused on a unifying theme in his work over the course of decades. I haven’t found one of my own yet since I’m still trying to cover a wide spectrum of photographic learning. Though I’d like to trust that like Burtynsky taking a wrong turn and stumbling onto an abandoned mine, a theme will find me when the time is right.

One of the very different things at my new job is how prevalent the use of contractors is, though it provides some interesting moments. My team currently includes a software architect in London, 3 on-site contractors, and an entire test team in India.

Those of us on-site go out for lunch every Friday, and this week we hit up a Mexican restaurant with one of the new contractors, who’s in the US from India for the first time. He was adventurous enough to try some Mexican food, which led to the interesting scene of one (Italian) Amerian, one Russian, and one more acclimated Indian trying to explain the nuances of various meat, cheese, and tortilla combinations. It worked out OK in the end; he got a couple of beef tacos and cleaned his plate

After obsessively shopping for a new camera bag for the last couple of weeks, I’ve become convinced that Philip Greenspun is quite right when he says, “The great thing about camera bags is that no matter how much you spend, you will never be at peace with one camera bag.”

Getting a sense of the size and utility of bags is tough to do online, so I ordered 4 to compare in person: Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home, Crumpler Soupansalad with The Bucket insert, Naneu Pro SLR/15.4″ Laptop Case Military Series, and the Mountainsmith Capture AT Medium. All fall in the $125 to $175 range.

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A growing trend in submitting support tickets is to redirect you to an existing answer using text analysis, search, and recommendations. Most of these systems miss the mark, but I have to again say how happy I am with my hosting company, A2 Hosting, for providing a suggestion that was spot on, and revealed they already had a solution for my problem. Instead of another question to answer, their helpdesk actually got a compliment in their inbox instead!

It’s funny - when I was actively looking for a job, LinkedIn didn’t offer me much, but now that I have one, I get all kinds of calls and emails. Most are from recruiters and hiring managers with positions of wildly varying quality, but one this week really threw me. A contracting agency saw my title of “Innovative Technical Lead for Agile Scrum Software Development” and called not to hire me, but to see if he could get me to hire his company’s contractors! This was amusing for a few reasons:

• Someone didn’t doubt for a second that I actually had authority
• I’ve never been a position to hire anyone, temporary or permanent
• My current employer actually does use a lot of contractors, from a firm that has both onshore and offshore workforces

Maybe I should change my title to Director and see if I start getting calls for Vice President jobs!

Almost as soon as I mused on What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, one of those paths found me. After a week of scrum training, my manager did a quick, quiet poll of the team, and ratified their vote for me as scrum master.

The fact that this was largely peer-driven makes it a bit more meaningful; certain skills are often only truly appreciated by other techies, and it’s nice that they trust me to keep management from meddling too much with their day to day development activities. It also plays to my desire to have a broader view and influence in the projects I work, and the provides the enjoyment that comes from mentoring in various forms.

My concern of losing hands-on technology time has only partially been realized; I’m still being tapped for some development work, though administrative matters seem to be consuming most of my time. It’s exciting to see the project really start rolling with scrum, and I’m much more engaged now that I have some skin in the game.

Taking some window portraits recently gave me a chance to try out Canon’s tethered remote shooting software. Its Mac version didn’t have an option to display the freshly taken photos, so I wrote a quick shell script to open each incoming image and gave it the requisite cute Mac name.

It watches the Pictures/Canon directory (this can be changed in the script), and opens new photos with whatever your default JPEG viewer is (usually Preview). This can take up a bit of memory if you don’t start closing the windows, but it’s quite handy for seeing what you really got in the shot on the big screen.

To use it, save the file and double-click it. To stop it, close the Terminal window it opens, or press Control-C.

Download Tetherball

Since I’m approaching 30, you’d think I’d have figured this out by now. I used to think I did: work hard, keep learning, and ultimately advance along a technical path on merit. Of course, that discounted the realities of office politics, Putt’s Law, and a business mindset often still focused on advancement only through the management chain. With them in mind, though, I’ve continued to pursue the goal of a more formal technical leadership position while carving out smaller leadership and project management roles along the way.

Technical leadership, to me, means keeping engaged and abreast of technology in order to guide the overall direction of a project and a small team to a successful delivery. This seemed to match the more hierarchical team lead interpretation of scrum master on my previous project, where the power and decision-making was largely concentrated in the “inner circle” that the scrum of scrums became. I take no credit for the term, but it’s totally apt - individual developers and even technical area leaders like myself were largely out of the loop.

Seeing the scrum master role as a facilitator and more of a project management role in this week’s training challenges that assumption. When I served as a scrum master before, I certainly found it to be more of that than technical direction. And it that respect is was still satisfying work - having the real pulse of the team and being engaged with many people to keep it beating. Growing as a technical leader also still appeals to me, though I’ve yet to see an organization or a pure enough scrum implementation where that kind of responsibility and authority naturally grows out of an individual role.

In summary, I suppose I’ve figured out one or two places I want to go, and am still working on finding and walking the right path to get there.

We’re doing a week of agile, scrum, and associated tool training at work this week for our whole team, and it’s really eye opening. As I mentioned before, despite a year’s experience with all of this, I’ve always seen it colored though other’s eyes and modified implementations.

At its core, most of it has nothing to do with software development or manufacturing, but just communication in general. Communication amongst a team, with their customers & users, and with the other stakeholders in a project. It’s a basic element, but one that easily becomes ignored or overly virtualized, losing the most valuable type of communication: face-to-face discussion. A good proof is that people use these methods for running a variety of non-technical projects and they do it with technology as simple as index cards and post-it notes.

Respect - and trust - are other core values. Businesses tends to treat people as resources, and get similarly unimpassioned work in return. Treating people as full members of a team with a stake and say in the project’s outcome has more than doubled productivity and quality for those who are willing to make a leap. And it is quite a leap: let a self-organizing team run their own work, replace a hierarchy of team leads with scrum masters who serve the team by removing impediments to facilitate work, and give the team the power to select and dismiss that person as necessary.

It’s a big cultural change to sell and execute, but given that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, it offers potential for truly effective increases in productivity, quality, and morale.