Raising Geeks (image: desktopnexus.com)

I’m a geek. I’m also a dad to 4 wonderful, geeky boys.  I like to think that I’m raising my boys to be complete geeks, the kind that randomly quote Star Wars and Bladerunner and dream in code. One might think this would be easy, given how much technology is surrounding us, constantly buzzing and beeping and reminding us to Tweet. But I think the real thing that is needed is exposure to true engineering ideas and principles. How do you get a 10 year old to think the way a programmer would? How do you unleash in them the types of problem-solving skills needed to be a passionate engineer?

Over the past three and a half years at ReadyTalk,  I’ve been involved in more than 250 interviews, and one thing that has been very interesting to learn throughout all of these interviews is what got people interested in pursuing a career in an engineering discipline. A common thread has been the rise of computer programming courses at the high school level (which was never really offered in my high school…I feel like I got robbed on that one). So I got to thinking, how do I encourage my boys to think about software engineering without feeling like it’s being forced on them? Here’s a few things I found and am encouraging in my home:

LEGO Mindstorms - This was an obvious one. LEGO’s are a kids best friend, and I am not ashamed to admit that I intend to purchase every LoTR LEGO set for myself. Combine that with programming and you’ve got an instant recipe for “raising a geek”. We’ve got the NXT 2.0 set at home and my boys love it, although the software for the Mac is less than ideal.

CodeCademy.com – I had read a few articles about the various online academies/schools opening up to help encourage and teach computer programming, so I thought I would check them out. CodeCademy even caught the attention of NYC Mayor Bloomberg, which I thought was really cool. The idea is to tear down the barrier of entry that might discourage people from exploring what computer programming is all about is a great thing that is happening. So, I introduced this to my kids and they are hooked. The fact that the site took the gamification approach is what I think is so appealing to younger kids. Every where you look you are able to earn badges and achievements and compare your progress with your friends, so why not apply that to learning programming? Pure genius awesome-sauce.

c-jump – This is a board game that a co-worker told me about. I haven’t purchased it yet for my kids, but it is on my list. I love the premise of it, though. The game takes the approach of teaching basic programming fundamentals, such as loops and conditionals. It reminds me of Chutes & Ladders, except you’re actually learning programming.

What this all comes down to is this; as the world’s current geeks, it is our obligation to help encourage and inspire the next generation of geeks. These are the young people that are going to shape the future world that we live in, and I for one want to know that I did my part in helping the kids of today become the engineers of tomorrow. How are you helping in this endeavor, and do you have other experiences or ideas on this topic? I’d love to hear them!

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

It’s 2012.  Everyone typically has great intentions this time of the year in putting foot to pavement and nailing down some concrete resolutions; things they really want to get done over the next year. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of my current role at ReadyTalk and the roles of those who surround me. One of my resolutions is for personal improvement.

Professional growth, and getting better at “your craft” is one thing that is constantly on my mind.  With my team, I’m always stressing that failure is a learning opportunity, but how do you learn and advance without waiting for failure? Simply put, you practice.

Ok, that sounds easy, you say. But, when you sit down to think about it, how exactly do you practice things like project management or people management or even software engineering? My day is filled with  productive meetings, but does going to meetings allow me to practice my people skills? Does making a spreadsheet or facilitating a story-pointing session give me ample opportunity to practice the craft of agile coaching? And more important to me directly, how does one practice effective leadership?

Dan King, our CEO, is an amazing leader and his thoughts and ideas inspire me. So I took a step back and examined what I see Dan doing almost constantly. The answer was reading, and asking questions. Dan is a voracious reader, and he uses the management and leadership books he reads to help formulate questions about how lessons learned by others could have been applied to his own experiences or how they could be applied to challenges that ReadyTalk may face as the organization grows. So, my goal is really about practice. Practicing leadership by way of reading and thinking more about leadership in different industries and domains. Also on my agenda is helping our engineers practice their craft of software engineering, but that is a blog post for another time!

I’d be curious to hear how you may have tackled this problem. How do you practice something that isn’t quite tangible, such as leadership or people management? Drop me a line and let me know!

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

The employees of ReadyTalk were recently challenged by Dan King, the CEO, to come up with a corporate vision. The format of this vision is supposed to be an article, written sometime in the future 10 or 20 years from now, about ReadyTalk as a company. We were tasked with doing this within our respective teams; to craft this visionary article and bring it back to the table and present it. The idea is then to combine the best of all these visionary articles into one, ultimate article. One article to rule them all.

This challenge is far more difficult than I thought it would be, to be quite honest. What will technology look like in 10 or 20 years? Things are moving so quickly now that the possibilities 20 years from now are nearly unbounded. How do you craft a vision statement for a company and it’s products around that? And then I read an article titled The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Can Teach Us – If We’ll Listen. There were several things in this article that really stood out to me as I was thinking about something as epic and large as a company vision.

I want to talk about the first point in the article, which is ‘The most enduring innovations marry art and science’. This is such an interesting idea, because when you think about it the simplicity of it doesn’t hit you right away. I think the point being made here is to build a team of well-rounded thinkers and problem solvers. You will only get so far if you build a team that only thinks about computer science. You’ve got to have other types of thinkers as well. This is very similar to our hiring practices at ReadyTalk and the common theme of passion. Creative individuals come from varied backgrounds; from music and robotics to athletics and extreme sports. The more varied thought you have in a team, the greater the end result will be.

Points #2 and #3 both really struck me, as well. I think they go hand in hand, to be honest. ‘To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups’ and ‘Never fear failure’; I believe that in order to achieve the first, you must have the second. We see this occasionally in our Labs projects that our engineers come up with and present to the company. We’ve seen some great, off-the-wall ideas that may be something that a customer has never asked for. But how often do we stop to ask “What if we put this feature in front of the customers”? Maybe they have never requested it because they have never thought creatively about solving a specific problem they were having. But in order to put something off-the-wall in front of customers, you’ve got to accept that the result may be failure. But will you have learned something in the process? Will you know your customers better or their needs better or their problem domains better?

What is your company vision? Have you ever stopped to think about what it might look like in 10 or 20 years, or have you only been focusing on getting through the next quarter? Maybe it’s time to take a step back and think about your own companies vision quest!

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

As many of you regular readers may know, we’re an agile development shop. We have been running a process known as SCRUM for quite some time now. We’ve had a lot of success with it, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. That’s how these agile processes work; continue to inspect and adapt and evaluate and adjust. If something isn’t working, put some time and energy into thinking about why it isn’t working and figure out a way to improve it as a team. As we’ve grown and scaled to more small SCRUM teams, we’ve realized that we could be gaining even more efficiencies because the start and stop points of an iteration tend to slow a team down.

Kanban, removing the need to "stop for the mail"

Enter Kanban. Kanban is similar to SCRUM in many ways, but one of the fundamental differences is there is no concept of an iteration. The process allows for and supports a model of continuous flow. If I had to come up with an analogy, it would be that of mail pickup from a train. The time wasted when a train has to stop, pick up the mail, and start again is tremendous when you are trying to maintain a schedule; instead let the train keep momentum and put the mail out to be picked up as it rolls by. Similarly, a software development team that is comfortable enough with ad-hoc and as-needed meetings can gain efficiencies by not stopping to “pick up the mail”. The backlog can be replenished as needed by a very involved product owner. The team can continue to retrospect and adapt and communicate without slowing down the momentum they are making on a feature release.

We began by trying Kanban with a single team that was very operational in nature. This worked well because it allowed the team to deal with those operational issues that came up while still keeping momentum on everything else. They didn’t have to worry about the operational issues killing their iteration commitments, which can be a morale hit, even though the business understood the impact that operational work had on the team in a SCRUM process. It was more of a mental victory than anything else.

We’ve since scaled the Kanban process to a number of feature teams and we plan on rolling it out across all of engineering. The feedback from the teams has been great, and the product owners have been supportive and understanding of the change in how a team’s velocity is tracked (cycle time vs. story point velocity). As a part of this process, we also moved from component teams to feature teams, which has been a huge benefit in keeping teams focused on a single project before moving on to the next project. Have you experimented with Kanban? Are you suffering from some of the same problems in your SCRUM process? I’d love to hear thoughts that you may have on this topic!

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people motivated and entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.

Continuing in our Engineering Lifestyle series, we are going to touch this week on the topic of “giving back.” Here on the engineering team and within ReadyTalk in general, we really try to give back to the community in many ways. From an engineering standpoint, we love to give back to the local academic community. Being located in Denver, we’re surrounded by several great universities, and many of our engineers graduated from local universities.

The first thing we focus on every summer is welcoming into the team a handful of interns, both for software engineering and quality assurance. Our recruiting efforts are always focused on local career fairs, and we’ve been especially lucky with the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado. This year we expect to hire around 4 or 5 interns throughout engineering, with at least one of those being a QA intern. Our typical approach has been to get an intern involved in learning about ReadyTalk, while turning them loose to work on something that is really interesting to them. The intern projects are not typically related to our production service, although they may work on things that indirectly impact our production service such as Avian. Our goal for internships is two-fold: we want the interns to get benefit from the work and learn something that they will be able to use as they continue down the path of a career in Computer Science, and we want them to get a taste for what working at a great company is really all about. We want them to get back to school and talk to all their friends about how great the ReadyTalk engineering department is and how much they learned from their internship. This is always a great thing and leads to more interest in our internship program year after year. To date, we’ve hired 3 of our summer interns full-time immediately following their graduation, and we’d love to see that trend continue.

The second way we give back to academia is to sponsor a senior project team each year. This year, we are sponsoring a team of 5 seniors from CU Boulder. The way the process works is: we submit a project idea to the university and the senior CS students get into teams and pick a project to work on for their senior project. This project is required for each senior at CU Boulder to graduate from the CS degree program. The student team works with us to understand the project requirements and what the deliverables should be, but they are given quite a bit of creative latitude in what they deliver. Our engineering teams meets with the student team every 2 weeks to go over any questions they have, give advice on how to implement certain things, or to answer any programming or code related questions. This is a year long effort, where the first half of the senior year is focused on planning and requirements, and the second half of the senior year is focused on implementation.

It’s always a great thing to be able to give back to the community, especially when you can be supportive of higher education in the process. We love to see up and coming computer science and QA engineers get great working experience that will help them succeed when they get to the big-time, and we try to help in every way possible. What successful ways have you seen software development companies giving back, or do you have suggestions of additional things that ReadyTalk could look at implementing?

Jason Collins (aka JC) is the VP of Engineering at ReadyTalk and the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer. He’s been either writing code or managing engineers for nearly 15 years and has a passion for technology and agile development practices. The happiness of the engineering team is his top priority and he can usually be found wearing a ReadyTalk cape and the infamous “idea helmet” around the office to help keep people entertained. When he’s not hanging out with his work family, he’s at home with his wife and four boys doing all sorts of geeky things, like playing video games and watching campy Sci-Fi and Action flicks.