My favorite Scrum event is the Daily Scrum. While often overshadowed by its flashier siblings — the dramatic demos of the Sprint Review or iterative improvements from a productive Retrospective — the Daily Scrum is essential for a Scrum team’s successful delivery of their Sprint commitments

Recently, I launched a new open source project. Unofficially called the Last First Letter Collab, the story is built using a writing pattern: a sentence’s first word must begin with the previous sentence’s last word’s last letter.

While creating the repo on GitHub, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the default branch, heretofore always named master, was now called main.

Being a scrum master, I often worry if velocity looms too large for me. From project forecasting to sprint planning to team retrospectives, velocity metrics are up in my grill more than bratwurst at a Green Bay Packers tailgate. Even from a “book learnin’” standpoint, velocity is front and center: “The Scrum Master is accountable for the Velocity … of the Team.” That big V Velocity is really intimidating! But does velocity warrant such verbal (and mental) emphasis?

It was the best of sprints, it was the worst of sprints.

One reason I find scrum so invigorating stems from its reliance on compiling lots and lots of data. Back when I was getting my English degree, I never would have imagined how much I love plugging numbers into spreadsheets and adding formulas to those sheets that makes the numbers show me things. I think it’s the same instinct that gave me great pleasure in alphabetizing my CD collection in a giant black binder (back when I actually needed stacks of physical media on my person to enjoy music).

As a scrum master and coach, I see the phrase “doing scrum wrong” thrown around a lot. Scrum practitioners often worry about making missteps, while detractors lambast scrum as being unrealistic and too rigid for how “the real world works.” In both cases, scrum is cast as a magical route through a maze of death traps (i.e. any project ever). Deviate from this hallowed path and you will surely wind up impaled at the bottom of a spike pit or crushed by a surprisingly spherical boulder.

Story pointing can feel a little wishy-washy, especially on teams that are new to scrum. While the inherent ambiguity to point estimation belies its power, folks need some place to hang their hat in grasping this concept.

Time estimation feels so much safer to people because of its universality. Time zones be damned, but an hour in New York City is the same span of time as an hour in Paris, Melbourne, or Bangkok. Even though hours, minutes, and seconds are just human constructs, since they are an everyday shared experience, guessing the time it will take to do something feels more precise than using the Fibonacci sequence. While we have mostly overcome the variance of a mechanically-slow timepiece, if you’ve ever felt the panic on the morning of daylight saving when your car’s clock is an hour off, you know how tenuous a concept time truly is.

A common question I am asked is “How will scrum deliver my projects on time?” and the honest answer is: it may not. Scrum is not a cure-all that can somehow force 10lbs of crap into a 5lbs bag. If a project contains too much scope and not enough time to do everything nothing can change that (especially not by adding more people to the mix).

That said, the power of scrum comes from its ability to make visible the data necessary to develop a fairly accurate completion window. This is accomplished by tracking a team’s velocity sprint-over-sprint and extrapolating a trendline from these data.

I’m of the opinion that having one, solitary new year’s resolution is a bit of a cop-out. A single resolution, while admirable, is invariably too simple to fail (eat more salad) or too massive to be measurable (be a better person). Better to aim for that overlapping sweet spot of the Venn diagram, maximizing both quality and quantity.

That being said, here are my goals for 2019.

I’ve been a WordPress user since 2007, continuously maintaining personal writing sites. I grew along with the product, moving from a casual hobbyist suffering through the Famous 5-minute Install to a WordPress professional, making my living from the open source CMS.

And while WordPress is a solid foundation for many web projects, a blog isn’t one of them anymore. Often derided as being “just for blogs,” WordPress’s product roadmap has steadily veered further and further from a platform for low-volume sequential writing with each jazzy release. While it’s empowering for a non-technical writer to wield plugins to tweak their WordPress blog in any way they see fit, be they janky or no, plugins rarely fully satisfy out-of-the-box. WordPress could only be the writing tool for me because I knew what chaff to deactivate, uninstall, or otherwise work around to get a post published.

What I like most about managing projects with Jira is the level of organization and filtering I can achieve by tagging tickets. As someone who used to keep his CD collection in alphabetical order by artist (with secondary ordering done by year), the tagging options help me structure projects in a deeply satisfying way—except for labels, which totally bite (mostly).

Once upon a time, a traveler entered a nondescript pizza palace. On each of the red-and-white clothed tables were squat shakers of parmesan cheese and crushed red pepper. The air smelled of garlic, oregano, and all the trappings of traditional East Coast pizzerias.

One of the selling points for (the free software that is) WordPress is its user friendliness. Intuitive, accessible, open—all of these words are at the root of what WordPress is and why it is of such benefit to the publishing world. I largely agree with this.

That said, I know I am an insider (albeit peripherally) to the WordPress community, so need to remember that I am an unreliable narrator. Still, inspired by the wonderful book “Design for Real Life“ by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer, I’m taking a critical eye to my CMS of choice. Comprised of examples of developer choices in language and quirkiness that hurt people in real-life, the book’s thesis aims to shift design thinking toward creating technology that is less assumptive, less witty, and therefore, less alienating.

In choosing to examine WordPress—specifically its onboarding process—I’m not out to indict the product in any way. I know WP well, make my living from it, and honestly, when something powers a huge chunk of the internet, there exists the most potential to influence the web dev industry through leading by example.

Word choice is important, a fact not lost on famed Norse explorer Eric the Red. When he discovered a semi-inhabitable landmass northwest of his native Iceland, he knew he needed a snappy name to attract settlers. How else would you get people to move to a giant, rocky ice slab roughly the size of the midwestern United States?And so he dubbed it “Greenland” and tapped into the verdant dreams of his people, thereby successfully pulling off the greatest bait-and-switch ever.And while some word choices can birth a nation, others have the power to elevate (a Subway “sandwich artist”) or deride (literally any racial slur). But many words are more nuanced in how we use them and how they affect both people, or an environment.

Collective nouns are single words for a group of things and I love them all (except for “guys”—that’s a bad one). I especially enjoy animal group names. Get three or more bears together, and it’s known as a sleuth. Same with a pride of lions, a bale of turtles, or a romp of otters. Bird collectives have the best names: a murder of crows, a chain of bobolinks, a deceit of lapwings.

Group terminology goes further than animals. A collective of houses could be a town. Words group together to form sentences. And a website is nothing more that a collective of files. A pile of files.

In this file pile, some items relate to simple things like font size or color choices. Others control complex things like data tracking and form handling. But surprisingly, more often than not, the largest files in the pile are the ones that do the least: images.

The writing process can make your brain feel like processed cheese (not to mention your self-esteem). Here are 10 steps for writing that will help you bridge the gap between one-and-done-drafts and that book chapter you’ve been rewriting for years.

If you work for a large corporation or on a project with limitless coffers, you have likely enjoyed working with a dedicated QA team. You build the website or oversee the coding efforts then hand off your labors to a separate team who systematically kicks the tires and identifies bugs with your work, reporting back on everything.

But, for the bulk of web work, QA and testing is not done by a standalone team with that single purpose. Rather, it’s one of many hats worn by everyone on a build team. Whether you’re a developer or a designer or a PM, everyone has a role in the QA process.

Project management requires much asking
Of clients and coders for more info
So that a PM can get to tasking
in Basecamp, Jira, or maybe Trello.
But before productive action can start
five basic questions need some addressing.
These W queries allow the heart
of a project to beat without stressing.

Stop me if you heard this one. A person walks up to a web developer and asks, “So how much would it cost for, like, a basic website?” We’ve all been there and have tried to explain that “it depends” without coming off sounding like a shyster.

“But you work with WordPress and I heard it was so easy you could use it right out of the box! I don’t want anything fancy; I’m just wondering what it would cost for a basic WordPress site.”

A CDN (Content Delivery Network),more commonplace in hosting plan offerings, is a must for any business site. By hosting web content on servers spread across the globe, content can be delivered to a user faster by using relatively localized servers.

But if you’re like me, you are not overly technical; you get the concept of a CDN in theory, but do you GET IT get it? Here’s my nontechnical take on what a CDN is and why it’s a true benefit for any website.

Working from home can be an amazingly fulfilling career experience. Likewise, a trip to your local Chinese food buffet can be a culinary delight. But both can also be abjectly horrible. Here is my breakdown on how to succeed at working remotely without the debilitating pains of post-dumpling bloat.

Before I was a web professional, before all the project management, front-end coding, and CMS rejiggering, I was an English major. My BA is in writing and, as such, I tend to approach most things I do from the stance of an author.

That being said, the Author User Experience (AUX) of WordPress has been on my mind for a while now. To me, regardless of use, WordPress is about sharing content: articles, images, audio, video. Specifically, WordPress is all about words. It’s right in the name and everything!

The words we use communicate shades of meaning that we might not want. Here’s a list of seven words that I strive to not use when discussing a project with a client or with my team.