I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep again. Thoughts and ideas were swirling in my head, so I wrote them down. I’m not looking for debate. #Leadership #CallToThink #CallToLead #CallToListen

Imagine, just for a moment, that you are free. You have no rent to pay, no mortgage to cover. You don’t need a car or to pay for the insurance. You don’t need to worry about going bankrupt should you get sick or injured by accident. You can meet your needs for essential food by walking to a grocery store near you. You have shelter, water, energy and waste services. You have freedom to choose what you want to do every minute of your waking hours. What would you do with that freedom?

Now, think about how close to that imagined picture we are right now, in the global pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19. Everyone is affected in some way, but each one differently. People in essential jobs, connected to basic human needs, are working harder than ever. People who work in jobs not directly connected to basic human needs are sheltering in place and physically distancing themselves from others. Since so many people now work on things not connected to basic human needs, society has come to a severe slowdown. The lifeblood we traditionally use to make society work – money – has stopped flowing easily. It’s as if the world has a giant blood clot in its main artery. Money no longer works well to support our civilization.

Road and air traffic have slowed down dramatically. As a result, our natural environment is becoming healthier. There is better air quality and less carbon dioxide being emitted. Maybe global warming is even slowing down for a bit – what if we could use this global “pause” for something really, really useful?

It seems to be a great time for us to collectively examine what we really need and what we want to do for the future of our civilization. When the current, acute, global health scare is over, do we go back to our old ways – restarting the engine that is creating a slow, imperceptible (for now) global disruption on a much bigger scale than this invisible virus? Could we redesign civilization to be sustainable to the point where we balance our consumption of natural resources with what the living planet can produce (see https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712)? Is this a time to talk about slowing population growth, to rethink the purpose of our economic systems, to fully internalize the interconnectedness of all living systems, to reshape or evolve the structures our societies have built with little conscious thought?

If your own answer to those questions is yes, how do you want those conversations to go? Where is the forum for having those conversations? How do you involve 7 Billion people in it? Or 230 million? Or 5 million?

Maybe this is not a conversation for everyone, but for people in leadership positions.

Maybe we haven’t had any real leadership capable of thinking in these ways since our oldest democracies were established.

Maybe we’ve all been too busy, chasing money, status and the acquisition of material things.

Maybe this is a time to develop extraordinary leadership capabilities that span incomprehensible complexities and help to find simple new rules we can start living by.

Maybe this a time for leaders in government, business and industry to dramatically shift their mindsets and perspective from squabbling and competing over money, market share, morality, religion and taxation to stepping into global consciousness and leadership to show us a new way, a new vision, and ways for us to move there?

Maybe this is the time for many to dive into developing their own leadership capabilities.

Is it time for you and me as well?

Categories: Environment, Opinion, Personal, Sustainability
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[This is a re-post from LinkedIn]

Picture this: You’re listening to a piece of classical music on the radio, and it really resonates with you. You want to listen to it again and again, so you want your own copy of it. But your radio doesn’t have RDS, and before you can find out from the radio host what it is, the signal dies, and all you hear is static. How would you know which LP/CD/MP3 you need to go look for? Chances are, you have no idea. All you know is that you heard some beautiful music, and you want to hear it again. You probably can’t tell which orchestra played it – was it the Vienna Philharmonic or the Boston Pops? So when you get to the record store/music download site, what will you do? Look for an enticing “cover” image/album art? Even if you find one that speaks to you and buy it, it may be that when you listen to the recording, it’s not the same. So now you’re out of money and disappointed. And the orchestra you really wanted to support has missed out on a small contribution to their financial well-being.

Now picture this: You’re at work, and you’ve convinced yourself that you need to hire someone to help you solve a problem. The people already on your team can’t solve it, or there is more work than they can take on. You’ve figured out the particular mix of skills a person needs to have to help you. How do you go and find that person? If you have a good network that might be able to connect you to someone with those skills, you probably start there. What happens if you don’t have that (or you come up empty-handed)? You probably talk to your HR people and tell them what you’re looking for, and since the people there are busy and don’t have the time to actually talk to the potentially hundreds of applicants that will be coming, they either call a recruiting firm or post an ad on a job-seeker website. Then applicants (who have been taught the rules of the job hunting game) craft a resume that matches 80% (or slightly more) of the skills you’re looking for (using an Internet service that promises to mimic very closely the applicant tracking system that will be used by the company to filter out “unqualified” applicants). They submit that resume, and the recruiter’s system (or the HR ATS) matches the resume and triggers an email. Then the recruiter (who most likely doesn’t really know anything about the mix of skills you’re looking for – they get paid for fast placement of people) may interview the person to make sure they didn’t exaggerate their skills. They send them on to the HR person, who probably also doesn’t know much about the skills you’re looking for (and that’s quite understandable – after all, HR has to deal with everything from custodial employees to CEOs). You get maybe ten or twenty resumes to look over, and you decide to bring five people in for in-person interviews. None of them turn out to have exactly the right mix of skills you need. So now you’ve lost time and you’re disappointed. And a person out there is missing out on a major contribution to their financial well-being.

What do you see in these two vignettes? What is broken? What is working? How would you change things? What advice would you give and to whom?

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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[This is a re-post from LinkedIn, just in case LinkedIn goes away some day… ;)]

Yesterday I had the opportunity to give an encore of my Agile 2017 workshop, provocatively titled “The Introverted Facilitator’s Survival Guide”. I presented it at ProMatch, and organization of volunteers partially funded by tax money. ProMatch helps people who are looking for work with learning about the current landscape of job hunting, presenting accomplishments, resume writing, interview skills, and networking. I find it a really valuable support system while I’m looking for my next opportunity.

I think about 16 people attended, which was a nice number considering the target audience: introverts. I won’t dive into the details of the workshop here (check my SlideShare for the digest version with most of the takeaways). It seemed to land well with everyone who participated, and at some point, I think we achieved what I half-jokingly called “quantum entanglement” 🙂

After the workshop I was pretty exhausted, but I chose to attend a meetup with the Silicon Valley ALN (Agile Leadership Network) anyway, and there I got to see a bunch of fellow (current and former) ProMatch folks (hi Andrew, Liz, Roberto and Jennie!) We learned from Bernie Maloney about harnessing the power of collaboration, and while I had done the activity from that session with one of my teams at work in the past, we ran through a variant that illustrated different aspects of what typically happens in real life.

After both of those experiences, I reflected on the day a bit, and posted a short blurb on Twitter about my satisfaction with the workshop I had facilitated, and how it seemed to have made a small difference in a few people’s lives. One person shared with me that they had a bit more appreciation for the strengths that their characteristics offer them. I interpret that as having been able to provide a small boost in self-confidence for someone else. And that felt very satisfying.

It got me to thinking about where we look to find confidence in our skills and capabilities. I think I tend to look at the people who are much further down the path of their personal agile journey than me, and I keep thinking “if only”. But yesterday I thought about whether that’s the right place to look. Maybe it would be better to look at where I am a half-step ahead of someone else and can bring them along with me a little bit. I wonder if in my quest for increasing my own skills and capabilities, I’m too focused on looking in the wrong direction.

Which direction do you tend to look?

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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I intended this to be my fifth and last post of 2012. Life intervened, and it turns out this will be my first post of 2013 instead. Blogging obviously took a back seat to other things last year. Sadly (seen from a certain perspective), I spent a lot of my time this past year reading that incredible time-sink, Twitter. I don’t follow many people, but the ones I follow always have something interesting in their streams. Another thing I spent a lot of time on, it seems, was working on a couple of Windows Phone apps and participating in local events around Windows Phone. But what really took up the bulk of my time at the beginning of the year was a project at work. And that’s what I will spend some time on now.

(A screenshot of HP Connected Backup running with a mock UI)

With the launch of Windows 8, HP has developed a more consumer-friendly version of the former Autonomy / Iron Mountain Connected Backup software, called HP Connected Backup. This is just one of the areas where HP is taking advantage of Autonomy’s technology and infrastructure, despite all the acquisition hoopla of late. I was closely involved in the implementation of the UI rewrite. The original Connected Backup software used a Java-based UI and was mostly offered for business and enterprise customers, and the user interface needed to change to be more consumer-friendly. As it happened, someone else made the decision that the UI should be implemented in WPF, still my favorite UI software technology stack. My involvement started when it became clear that the nature of the work was more complicated than the team working on the product had enough experience to pull off.

I had just finished work on another product that ended up only shipping via HP’s support website (called HP Quick Start, a tool for Windows 8 similar to Samsung’s S Launcher, now apparently renamed to Quick Starter; incidentally, there’s a really interesting story about why HP Quick Start didn’t ship, but that needs to be told in 10 years or so, not now). A colleague and I went to Austin, TX to meet with the Interaction/UI design company so I could learn about the amount and kind of work to be done. Their technical team had already started working with the HP development team in the Boston, MA area, and I got set up to work with them remotely as well. Some time after getting my feet wet in the codebase that had already been built (with a great M-V-VM foundation), and working with the Boston team over the phone, another colleague and I visited the team in Boston to start our collaboration for real. We stayed for about a week and got a few things done while we were there, but more importantly, we got to know the people on the team, and they got to know us a bit.

After returning from Boston, the real work began. I participated in daily stand-up meetings via phone. Because of the three hour time difference, I then had a few hours of opportunity to work while the remote team was available for questions and collaboration, and then I would continue working on my own, mostly from home. At the end of my day, I’d have the codebase pretty much to myself, so I didn’t have to worry too much about conflicting code check-ins.

Apart from looking at deliveries from the design house and making sure that everything from them was working as expected, I also built and customized many of the key UI components that were needed for the product. Let me run through just a few.

The tab control for the settings UI

The tab control work was mostly a job of cutting apart the Photoshop files from the design firm and fitting them into a styled TabControl/TabItem combo. The trickiest part was adjusting the transparency of the photoshop layers to make the transitions from tab to tab look right.

The UI that indicates file version numbers in the backup set

This control is based on heavy customization of the stock WPF DataGrid control with intricate interception of routed events and some complex visual tree trickery to get the interaction with the checkboxes and expansion/collapsing just right. Not to mention the view model construction, mapping the data to the actual backup information from the cloud (the data model).

The “accordion” control for the main UI

The accordion control is based on the WPF toolkit from February 2010, which contains an experimental implementation of such a beast. It was difficult to customize because it isn’t well documented and has a bunch of built-in behavior that we didn’t want. Not only did this require customizing the toolkit accordion’s styles, I also ended up building custom templates for the way the elements in the headers needed to switch appearance between the expanded vs. collapsed state. This was one of the last things to be finalized on the product. It was a very look-bound control to begin with, and it had a few bugs that were impossible to fix easily by modifying the source code.

The top header with the promotional offer

The offer header wasn’t too much work, except in the area of making it appear and disappear under the right circumstances (you don’t want it to show once a customer has subscribed, but you want it to show up again some time before a subscription expires). If I remember correctly (it was a while ago now), I even dug into writing some of the necessary async cloud client code that could retrieve the offer information from HP’s Connected cloud services. Because the final design deviated from what was delivered by the design firm, I actually ended up iterating on the visuals quite a bit with our Product Owner to arrive at something that was acceptable.

The “spinner” control and assets

Many parts of the UI are dependent on fetching information from the cloud, which can take a while. In these instances, it’s common to display a form of wait indicator to let the user know that something is happening. We had a control for such a wait indicator from previous products, so I didn’t need to create it from scratch, but the visuals for this control were, of course, new. Since the control uses a “flipbook” animation style (it renders a new image rapidly enough to give the impression of movement), I needed to create all the rotated snapshots for the flipbook to go through. This involved using Image Magick and a bunch of command-line scripting to automatically rotate and crop the original source image. Since we needed three different sizes of the spinner, I actually ended up modifying the existing control somewhat more than I thought, and created multiple sets of flipbook images via the Image Magick scripts I created.

The scrollbar assets

During usability studies it became apparent that our design firm had been – let’s say – “optimistic” on the size of the scrollbars that the UI needed. It turned out they were too hard for people to notice and use (i.e. too small). So I had to modify the underlying visual assets (Photoshop files again) without their help and adjust the scrollbar styles to accommodate the new, bigger parts.

Templates for dialog boxes

As part of being responsible for the overall translation of the wireframes and visuals from our design partner firm into real code, I needed to make sure our various dialog boxes were presented with a consistent style. Since there were too many dialogs for me to work on directly, I created sketches of guidelines for the team to use when they needed to work out a new dialog.

Quick Tips usability aid

I mentioned earlier that we conducted usability studies on the product. By the time we had enough of the product ready for testing, we found that the accordion design of the main UI was not as usable as we had hoped. Even with lots of tweaks to the original visual design cues/clues, people found the two panels of the accordion too difficult to use. I had toyed with the idea to integrate a tutorial of sorts into many of the products I’ve worked on in the past, but never seemed to have an opportunity to do something about it. Well, this time, I decided to take the time. I started implementing the idea and showed prototype screenshots to our usability lead. He liked the concept, and helped me work with our Product Owner to incorporate the idea into the final, shipping code, even though it was close to shipping time. We ended up naming this “Quick Tips”. WPF’s ability to layer UI elements on top of each other made the implementation relatively simple. One part that I’m quite proud of having been able to incorporate into Quick Tips was the ability to operate the UI from code, using WPF’s UI Automation framework. This was something I had wanted to work with ever since I attended the first sessions on this when WPF was unveiled as “Avalon/WinFX” at Microsoft’s PDC 2005. I was quite impressed with the capabilities of the platform in this area. It was relatively straightforward to open and close the accordion as needed to have tips pop up in the right context, etc. The only thing that was a bit tricky was to open up the help context menu and have it stay open with the “Quick Tips” menu item highlighted.

This is just a quick tour of a part of the work that was involved in creating HP Connected Backup. I’ve focused on my work, since that’s what I know best. The larger team worked on many, many more aspects of the product, not the least of which is, of course, readying the backend infrastructure for a consumer-level product and creating a UI for entering subscription and billing information. A part of the product I haven’t touched on at all is the subscription wizard, a standalone app that brought other UI challenges with it, and that walks the customer through the steps of creating an account on HP’s cloud systems and preparing the local system for backup of the customer’s data. This app required quite a bit of tweaking from the original design.

WPF riding into the sunset?

During the work with the accordion control I took a look at the WPF toolkit, since it had such a control in an “experimental” stage. “Experimental” – yeah, no kidding! After much fighting to get it to look the way it needed to look (the WPF toolkit accordion control is not “lookless” like most WPF controls), it became obvious that the version of the control in the “binaries” was different from the version in the source code, so modifying the source code to fix certain bugs was impossible. So I had to resign myself to re-styling much of the control and creating ugly, hacky workarounds for bugs I found.

And this is where my swan song for WPF starts. It seems pretty clear that Microsoft has completely de-invested from carrying WPF forward through their past community efforts. Yes, there’s been a lot of investment in WPF 4.5, but that seems to be about the end of the line. The WPF toolkit was supposed to be a vehicle for taking feedback from the community, developing something in response, refining it, and eventually integrating that into the platform. I think that’s how the calendar control in WPF came about, as well as many other things. The last release of the WPF toolkit was in February of 2010, almost three years ago. Apparently, and I’m guessing here, the work on Windows 8 took a lot of the “steam” out of WPF. The focus was put on developing the XAML platform for Windows 8 “Store Apps”. And it’s been quite detrimental to WPF. From my perspective, WPF’s problem lies in the fact that many of the visionaries behind the original concept are no longer involved in the product. It may very well be that WPF is a mature technology by now (although some people see it as not having fulfilled its promise by a long shot), but leaving it in maintenance mode seems to me to be stopping before you’re really “done done”. Such a pity to see a platform with such incredible potential being wasted for whatever reasons.

Windows 8 XAML

Finally, a small rant on Windows 8 XAML: Compared to WPF, the Windows 8 XAML platform is clearly a “V1” product. It’s almost embarrassing how much of the power of WPF is missing from the Windows 8 XAML platform. I can only point to a few things off the top of my head, but I’m sure you can find many references elsewhere. There’s no tiling Image Brush. No Radial Gradient brush. A lot of the built-in controls are laden with “fast and fluid” behavior, such as built-in transitions, that are very cumbersome to remove or alter. The data binding mechanisms are primitive compared to WPF. Having worked with this new platform for a little while now (a topic for another post, perhaps), I think I can say that I’m disappointed. It’s hard to live up to the power of WPF. I hope Microsoft will get there eventually and I hope WPF will come back “from the dead” now that Windows 8 is here.

Categories: Microsoft, Opinion, Software, Software development, Windows 7, Windows 8, WPF
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