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Our IT / infrastructure guy is going on vacation.  Left behind a cheat sheet for his backup to help him understand how best to assist our team with Git…  LOVED his notes as to how to help team members who approach with questions or challenges with using Git (distributed version control system, otherwise known as ‘let all of work on code together’).  Catch his last bullet and tell me that he doesn’t get how to motivate software developers…

“I broke Git again/I don’t understand Git/Tell me how to use Git/What is Git/Git? Is that like a potato?”
First, if they don’t seem to understand the fundamentals of Git, ask them if they’ve read Chapters 1-3 of the Git Book: http://git-scm.com/book

If they haven’t, make them read it before continuing. Git can be complex and if they don’t know the fundamentals you will have to hold their hand through everything, and they will likely end up breaking something.

We also have a Confluence page with a bunch of helpful Git links and examples: Git Resources

If they are still confused, feel free to question their man/womanhood. Just do it nicely.

This is all after a tutorial, a few guidance emails, instructions available on our wiki (Confluence instance)…  He’s done a great job bringing the team along in its transition from Subversion (a different version control system which has a different model) to Git.  So now “if they are still confused, feel free to question their man/womanhood.”  But “do it nicely”….

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Had reason to sign up for an Amazon S3 account yesterday to use as a download area for the anticipated spike in traffic to our project in the very near term. Was amazed that:the following set of steps worked so amazingly well:
– the site had me give it some info, including a phone number
– site told me it was going to call, and that I need to punch in a pin # it put up on the screen there
– I got an automated phone call and entered that pin
– as soon as I got off the phone, the site updated itself to say that it was creating my S3 account structure.

Amazing! Web site synched with autodial phone system which (I think) had its message crafted based on my info which then synched back to the web site’s back-end server to do finish processing and do a server push out to the site itself saying that the transaction had completed. Excellent user experience: no time lapses seen and my account got created seamlessly. Very cool use of multiple technologies, done breezily on the part of Amazon.

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I’m trying to use a class within Grails. Specifically, I want to use one of their Codecs classes that comes within Grails itself to let me build a tool to encrypt a password, so that I’d then be able to set up their Codecs to use to decrypt / use within the application, so that I’m not storing an unencrypted database password. Grails provides Codecs – should be “easy” to use them, rather than needing to write my own. Cryptography is one of of those areas that causes code reviewers to grow concerned, in terms of releasing code out into the wild, so being able to point to making use of an existing class would have been highly helpful. However, in attempting to use a static encode closure, getting all sorts of muck which I’d need to include in the classpath, etc. Grrrrrrrrrr….

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The Christmas season is fast approaching. If you’re looking for an opportunity to spread some Christmas cheer, particularly with families who are finding it hard to make ends meet, consider contributing a toy to the New Hope Community Church Christmas store. I’ve visited their church a few times, and always been impressed by their approach and attitude to reaching out to the community. The Christmas Store is a great model: new or gently used toys of ~$10 value are made available to families for $2. That lets families shop and obtain toys at a much lower impact to their budget, allowing them to use their money in other ways more necessary for their families (food, rent, medicine, etc), while letting them still enjoy the holiday aspects of giving gifts to your kids that so many of us so look forward to. How much fun is it to select that perfect gift for a person you love and then get to anticipate their face as they open it and play with it?

Their church will hold two Christmas Store days – once in their worship center, and once in a recreation center in the Curtis Bay community. They’d like to provide for 600 children, so every gift added in counts! Look for sales at your local stores, and see what your budget can score to bring a ray of joy not just to the child who opens that package, but to their parents and extended family… This ministry grows each year – your gift will be put to good use.

Happy to serve as a gathering point for these toys, or to put you into contact with the ministry leaders organizing the drive overall. They’re also seeking gift wrapping items – paper, tape, gift bags, tissue paper. Leave me a comment with your contact info or email me directly if you have my address already: comments are moderated, so your info won’t be visible to the world.

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My womens’ rugby team, Severn River Rugby,  is planning a tour of South Africa next summer!  Very exciting!  We’re planning to be there for two weeks, and our coach is looking at finding us three games.  Doing some poking around, apparently womens’ rugby has only really been in action there since 2001.  Coach took another local team, the Washington Furies, in 2004, so this then becomes a chance to introduce a new set of ladies to each other, communicating through the hard-hitting language of tackles on the field with socials off the field.  We’re seeking sponsors for this trip: if you’re interested in helping encourage the growth of womens’ rugby, not only here, but internationally, please let me know.

I have other interests beyond rugby  – surprise to so many who know how driven I am about getting to play my sport.  If we/I am going to Africa, I’m seeking to make good use of that time and expense to do something which honors the Lord.  I’ll sneak as many of our players in along with me, whether or not their personal motivations are for the Lord, for serving others, or just for checking out an interesting experience.  It turns out our church is connected with a missionary family in South Africa, so reaching out there.  Our coach connected me with a group called ‘Hope in South Africa’ – check out their Sundowners event this Oct 20.  I’m not personally involved with the group yet, but the things I’m seeing on their site and on their Facebook page are very interesting and inspiring to read.  If you’re personally aware of other areas, very interested in hearing.  Again, the driver here is just that if I’m investing the time and money to go to Africa, away from other areas in life, it oughta be for more than “just” playing rugby and touring around.

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I’m a beer girl. I like good beer. I like to taste varying beers and try to find something new and unique. And then I forget what I tried that was new, unique, and tasted good. So going to start collecting beer thoughts here.

Beer of the evening: espresso oak aged Yeti, by the Great Divide Brewing Co from Colorado. It’s an imperial stout. Its bottle suggests food pairings of “breakfast burritos, eggs Benedict, hash browns, cheesecake, creme brulee”. Think I’ll avoid beer with breakfast, but interesting from a marketing materials kind of perspective.

I definitely lean towards porters and stouts. None of that IPA stuff for me, generally. Lagers and ambers in moderation. Not so much into the hoppy beers – want my beer to have a bit of heft to it. Feel free to comment and suggest things I should try. Last weekend, had an Oatmeal Stout at Brewer’s Alley that was pretty good. Don’t think that’s available except for a drive out to Frederick, though, and it wasn’t amazing enough to cause the round trip.

Beer experiment still in progress for a light beer. In that same idea of finding a diet soda that’s a stand-by, figured I’d look for a good light beer. Tried Michelob Ultra lime and cactus – gosh darn awful stuff. Bud Light / Miller Light – worse and worse. Corona Light – vaguely drinkable, my go-to when I’m out with my rugby team, but otherwise not a preference. Sam Adams Light – workable, but not all that interesting.

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I had an opportunity to speak at the NASA/Veteran Affairs/State Department’s Open Source Summit earlier this week. I got to be part of a lineup of speakers sharing with attendees on the topic of ‘Building and Managing Community’.   The topic’s near and dear to my heart, as it’s a lot of what I spend my time on at work for the program that I and my company support. It’s also one of the differentiators, I think, in terms of why we’ve been successful so far in this grand experiment on behalf of our customer. Enabling people to understand what we’re building for them, to participate in that and advance it further, even when it’s in directions that we either hadn’t considered or frankly aren’t as interested in pursuing – that takes a lot of time to do well. Until we get better at it, we’re in a mode where we’re investing person by person, responding to emails and evaluating patches folks have submitted. Our private email group so far has > 250 messages on it this month, all of which are moderated to make sure the person sending it didn’t accidentally leak something they shouldn’t, and most of which are responded to. (OK, the 250 counts my team’s responses – I’d rather spend time giving good responses than getting perfect metrics – our responses are moderated, too, so technically an accurate metric there.) One of my goals over the next few months is to figure out ways to provide better community engagement outside of the email pattern, as some things coming down the pike for this year will cause our 1500+ community to grow significantly. I was impressed to hear that Eclipse, across its many many projects and millions of lines of code, only has 15 folks on payroll. That was inspiring, and will cause me to go looking for patterns and ideas I can use in community building to assist with those sorts of approaches. (Suddenly debating attending the Community Leadership Forum in Portland in July this year – was a very useful thing to attend two years ago as we were standing up our program. I may need a refresher, methinks.)

The room wasn’t large, compared to some other rooms I’ve spoken in of late, and the audience was interested in our topic. The forum of the presentations was that each speaker had 6 minutes to talk on their topic, and then we’d later break out into separate rooms to let folks engage directly. I wish it had worked out slightly differently, as that meant the speakers didn’t get to engage across each other and all of the attendees in the room ended up in different rooms: one of my lessons learned throughout this whole community-building effort for our program has been that I/we don’t know it all, and there’s nearly always someone who has a nugget or more that would be useful to hear and consider. Didn’t really have much of that opportunity. I didn’t get to attend Deborah Bryant’s talk, as I got pulled in with someone who wanted to chat after my talk.  (Did catch the tail end of Mike O’Neill’s breakout session on OSEHRA – very interesting to hear other government projects treading similar paths as ours.  Wandering across the OSEHRA site this morning, seeing lots of great community tools / patterns I’d like our project to emulate.)  My own breakout drew the slot before lunch as my time, which was also the slot at the same time as the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation and an Apache Foundation guy (separate rooms), so, uh, I and one attendee had a great conversation. Well worth it, though, as this guy was working to do some of the same kinds of things for his customer, and we were able to share notes and I could steer him towards some resources built out to help with that path.

Did realize it’s a long time since I’ve been in Toastmasters. 6 minutes is a short time to try to pack in a few key points. Since I work on behalf of an agency that has certain review requirements before you can speak publicly, I couldn’t develop new materials for this briefing. The slide deck I pulled from was one which had originally been built out for a 30 minute talk. Before this week’s talk, I removed a number of slides, and took out a few bullets that didn’t lend to my point for this week, but it still ended up as a talk delivered at race-pace. Clear ideas in my head, some of which came out well, I believe, but I’m still waiting to see the video to do my own critique of what came out and how well it came across. And possibly ship myself back to Toastmaster’s sessions….

So, the talk was Thursday, and I guess my brain just got around to processing everything last night while I was sleeping. Woke up from a dream this morning just as I was at a conference, being called up as one of the first speakers, patting myself on the back for being well prepared and ready to provide useful information. The conference organizer (thankfully only in my dream) tells us as we’re moving up from our seats that we’re going to kick off the conference by having the first presenters sing the Star Spangled Banner together. Woke up at that point, kind of giggling at myself. Uh, I sing in church and I’ll sing in worship gatherings, where the point is to worship and make a glorious noise unto the Lord. I don’t sing otherwise, because I don’t sing well. Glad that even in my dream I didn’t have to witness the outcome… No idea what the dream “means”, in terms of what my brain is processing back there, but now I’m not only mentally running through whether I got my points across well in my actual speech, but whether I can remember the words of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and which points were going to be painful for listeners versus radically painful for listeners. Hee hee….

(Technical note: for those of you who look up the agenda, I don’t work for DISA, the agency they have listed.  We cleared that up slightly at the conference, just to convey that the agency my company and I work for has requirements as to what you can share about who you work for, and so I wouldn’t be sharing that information quite so directly there…)

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[Thoughts below are personal wrestlings, not canonical statements on behalf of my company.  Not citing my company intentionally, and won’t approve any comment that makes the direct tie…]

This question was posted anonymously to our corporate Q&A / feedback site yesterday: “In light of [my company’s] committment to open management and last month’s Equal Pay Day (raising awareness of the gender pay gap), has the management team analyzed our pay/compensation structure to determine whether a gender gap exists?”  Speaker went on to say ” I think increased transparency in this realm would improve morale and make it less likely that employees will jump ship since they would be aware of efforts to ensure pay fairness”.

First reaction: mad – not at the starting question itself, but that it came across as an anonymous question (showing bias on my part – speaking to it in a minute).  Next reaction: mad at the posting itself.

So, first reaction: mad at a topic meant to be taken seriously presented anonymously.  That’s such a weighty topic, and the posting comes across as an implied accusation or implied hurt of an individual.  It  deserves real interaction and a two-way listen to clarify what’s really meant.  It would be a great conversation to have with leadership in person, where there’s a two-way dialogue and some thought.  I’ve had conversations with leaders in my company where I’ve said I’m wrestling with something – each wrestle helps me then more clearly either the company’s culture or my role within it or even something about how I communicate or lead.  These anonymous questions both short-circuit that process for the person asking the original question, and then help set the tone for more anonymous questions.  I assume this person has a real question from her (gender assumed on my part) view of the company.  Would rather treat it as a valid, fair, and intended as respectful interaction with the company, and encourage folks to dare to discuss either online or in person the real things that they need to see answered.

Next reaction, and stronger: mad at the posting itself.  It comes across as “women are being treated unfairly”, “I’m a woman and I need you to prove to me that I’m not being treated unfairly”.  I read it as an implication that a corporation has a responsibility to not only ensure pay fairness and lack of bias but then to make it “transparent” to the satisfaction of the requestor.  Of course, I take particular offense as a woman in technology that that particular factor is the area raised here…  The rub here is that I want women to be treated as individuals, not as a class.  I no more want women to be treated unfairly because they’re women than I want the new hire to always be locked into a salary driven by the market conditions of when they got hired or the older guy to get a larger salary because of years of experience, regardless of their ability to have learned from and apply that experience.  The individual who’s consistently making a high level of impact to the company’s goals should be making a higher salary.

Now, that said, if I recognized a disparity on any particular aspect not correlated with performance or value added to the company and customer, I’d call it out.  I have confidence, in fact, that my company does work to do the right thing here, and has done general salary comparators across the industry before.  Whether it is explicitly sliced/diced for factors like gender, age, market conditions when folks were hired in, etc, I don’t know.  I actually suspect we’re not a large enough company to make statistically meaningful comparisons just treating things mathematically.  But I do know that I’ve seen enough evidence that the company works to adjust salaries as part of the salary review process to have faith here.  Not knowing who the poster was, going to assume they haven’t seen those things in play and just incorrectly assume that believe that we must be like “every other” stereotypical company, motivated to ‘keep salaries down’.

Really interested to see who responds directly on the internal posting.  I’m still digesting myself to sort out personal reaction from dialogue-advancing exchange.  Happy to have conversations with folks where we’re listening to each other’s thoughts; not happy to post something where I’ve gotta assume I’m missing at least some of the real drivers for the individual, and I’ve further gotta assume that anyone who reads my stuff is missing some of my drivers.  Key for me is to not treat folks as a group unless you have evidence that the group is being treated differently or badly.  Note that that would be ‘here, in the current place’, not in a out in the ecosystem in a hear-say kind of way.   Also, work to establish a relationship and understanding of your company and the people within it, and then treat folks as doing the right thing, until experiencing evidence of otherwise.  Next step for me is to go talk with a few folks internally and see if I can help respond to the concern in some way,

Don’t want to not share some great things the writer included.  The writer cited a great TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) about why we have too few women leaders.  I’ve sent that video around before to folks, though my take on Sandberg’s point is to step forward as an individual and lead.  The writer also cited an article which indicated that pay disparity is at least contributed to heavily because women often don’t negotiate their salary.  Both articles are useful things to spread to help people (not just women) understand things they can do to help grow their own careers or understand how they may be in fact contributing to their concerns as to pay gaps.

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Today was the last day of Severn River Rugby’s spring season. Any typos in this post are the fault of two fingers being taped together after at least bruising, possibly breaking one of mine. But the season wound up undefeated! Highlights: stopping a try (today) on the goal line; not being last finishing sprint drills in practice (I am the oldest player by several years on the team); getting picked to play A-side consistently; getting asked to play for the Olde Girls at RuggerFest (35+ team, selective, many players have played at the top tiers of womens’ rugby); PLAYING for the Olde Girls (not only undefeated, but not scored upon during the weekend); scoring a try; torqueing (breaking?) my nose; going to work with a black eye (non-nose related)…

Great season! Sorry to see 15’s end. We have a few weeks off before 7’s season practice begins. Many, many thanks to my hubby for letting me play! Most appreciated! And Cora now wants to play kids’ rugby (touch) this summer – looking forward to it!

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Hearing lots about the mega million jackpot today. $640 million would certainly make an impact in most folks’ bank accounts. Apparently, $640 mil is more than what most US households would earn in 10,000 years.

Your odds of winning are long.  Ridiculously long.  2 hole in ones in a single golf game long.  You’re more likely to be crushed to death by a vending machine or dying by being a lefty who uses right-hand products, according to the Daily Beast.  But boy, wouldn’t it be nice to live like a mega millionaire?

Um, no.  Not thinking so.  Maybe a mini millionaire.  Someone who has enough money in the bank to not worry about whether they’re covering the bills, not feeling like they’re stuck in their job, able to dream a bit and feel like they could make those dreams (travel, motorcycle, adventures, …) come true.

Mini-millionaire is easy, and a lot less dependent on 1 in 176 million odds.  Live below your means.  If you make 100K, live on 85-90K or less.  If you make 60K, live on 45-50K, or less.  Act like you’re still making the money you started your career with – no cost of living increases, no raises or promotions.  What’s that do for you?  It does a few things.  One, you’re not stuck in what I’ve heard termed as ‘golden handcuffs’.  Golden handcuffs are jobs that you have to keep because they’re the only ones that will give you the kind of salary you need to live on.  You’ll keep going to a place that you don’t like, doesn’t inspire you, or otherwise give you any reason to keep going to work other than that particular paycheck number.  It’s a gilded cage.  It’s a demotivating cage.  You’re not going to do your best work if the reason you’re still there is only pocketbook motivated.  For one thing, there’s always the distraction of looking for the cage upgrade.  Ones’ monetary ‘needs’ have a funny habit of growing, unless specifically kept in check, so soon enough that cage starts feeling just a bit snug.

Second, it gives you a ‘go-to-he**’ fund.  It gives you money in the bank which you can use as a cushion to find a different job at any point.  A guy I knew at a job a few years ago didn’t particularly like his job, but was paid at the top of the market.  He ended up laid off, as top of the line salaries make you top of the line targets.  The top of the line salary part wasn’t a bad thing, but his need to get a job very quickly gave him a large salary-sized problem.  Contrast that with having the freedom to say: I don’t like this job.  I don’t like working for you.  I’m not going to do it anymore.  It’s a wonderful and yes, powerful feeling, to know that you’re working for someone because you want to, not because you specifically need to.  Now, there’s a difference between need to work generally, meaning at some point you need to get another job, versus never wanting to work again.  Somewhat theoretical for me – having a hard time imagining myself not working at all at some point in the future, even if that work is part-time or volunteering or …  My point is, since entering the workforce out of college, it’s been a goal of mine to never work somewhere just because they’re willing to pay me, even if they pay me well.   And a ‘go to he**’ fund is a great tool to help that happen.

Lastly, and on the much more personally rewarding side, one of the things that millionaires often do is give lots of money away to causes they find inspiring.  Warren Buffett has Girls, Inc, Bill Gates has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie had Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Mellon, etc, etc…  They write checks to help make things happen.  When you live below your means, giving away money no longer is making a choice between helping yourself and helping someone else.  There’s a lot more latitude there to give more freely.  It hasn’t really cost you anything.  Now, one can make the argument that it costs you the things that you’re otherwise not doing in your lifestyle with that excess (my term) money.  Still, though, it costs you something you’re not doing, not something you are – very different dynamic.

Reading the paper this morning, someone in Maryland won one of the Mega Million lottery tickets. It’s not me, I’m certain, as I didn’t buy a ticket.  Whoever won has a lot more means this morning than they did last night.  It should be a bit easier to live within it.  That said, there’re many lottery winners who don’t live within their means and go bankrupt, even at the tune of income of the level of millionaires.  Contrast that with folks who build their habit of living within their means and become ‘The Millionaire Next Door’.  Or, better, the guy who lives like a millionaire because he’s not beholden to his job and gets to give away his money to the causes that he finds near and dear.  Bank account balance may or may not make him a millionaire, but he sure feels like one.