Author: Peter Barber

Gretchen Rubin says a useful way to think about people’s behavior is by considering how willing they are to meet or resist expectations on them. Expectations can either be external, like your boss asking for a project to be completed or internal, like exercising regularly.

From these she identifies the four combinations labelled as The Four Tendencies.

	External Expectation	Internal Expectation
Upholder
Questioner
Obliger
Rebel

 Meets  Resists

This could provide you with more empathy when considering your colleagues, friends or family and make you a more effective communicator. Maybe try thinking about members of your software development team and which tendency they seem to exhibit.

Which one are you? Take the quiz and find out.

A Kanban board seems at first site like something easy to implement. You draw some columns on a wall, put headings for backlog, in progress and done and then stick postit notes all over it to represents tasks, easy right?

Well kind of 🙂

I’ve been promoting the use of Kanban at our company, we have been using it for about 6 months now. I knew it was an incremental approach and that we should introduce something simple and build from there with the attitude of continuous improvement (Kaizen).

However, alot of the Kanban guides push you in at a quite advanced level, talking about limiting Work In Progress (WIP) and pulling work through the system.

For immature teams (which I guess is the majaority first adopting Kanban) this is too much early on and could lead to the team rejecting the kanban system.

After reading David J Anderson’s excellent book I’ve come to realise that the best way is to evolve Kanban into an organisation gradually, being aware of the maturity of your team and matching that to the sophistication of the Kanban system in use.

This is a great article on doing just that:

http://anderson.leankanban.com/kanban-patterns-organizational-maturity/

Here’s a linux command I found useful in extracting simple transactions per minute from log file entries

grep -h 'Unique text per transaction' requests.log.* | cut -c1-16 | uniq -c | sed s/./,/8 > transactions_per_minute.csv

This produces a file with the number of transactions/requests for each minute over time: e.g.

34,2017-03-29 11:45
83,2017-03-29 11:46
114,2017-03-29 11:47
84,2017-03-29 11:48
70,2017-03-29 11:49
64,2017-03-29 11:50
76,2017-03-29 11:51

You can now convert this into a visually revealing graph, using for example Google Sheets e.g.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates -y
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
sudo echo deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-xenial main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge lxc-docker
sudo apt-get install linux-image-extra-$(uname -r) -y
sudo apt-get install docker-engine cgroup-lite apparmor -y
sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER
sudo service docker start