Coming Soon: Slides from 2013 Silicon Valley Code Camp

This past Sunday afternoon, I gave a talk about my experience creating a proof-of-concept of a distributed, RESTful, micro-service-oriented implementation of a feature from our core applications. I’ll be adding the slides as soon as I repair them (my laptop crashed after the presentation, so I need to fix the file). If you want to be notified when they’re available, go here to signup for this blog’s newsletter (and then feel free to unsubscribe afterwards!).

Formatting Lists With Code for LeanPub

I use LeanPub to publish my books (e.g., The Jackson Cookbook), which uses Markdown and some extensions to format the book. I’ve found it useful to do lots of tests, because formatting things like lists can get complicated when they’re nested, have code blocks, or have multiple paragraphs per item. Since I’ve seen questions around this on the LeanPub group mailing list, I figured I’d write a post with an example text file of Markdown and a PDF showing how it gets formatted.

This is the source Markdown text for the example.

This is the generated PDF based on the above Markdown text.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post.

Another Alternative to the Retrospective “Prime Directive”

I was recently preparing to facilitate a retrospective with another team in my company and one of the things I like to start out with is setting a tone of “we’re here to learn, not to point fingers or feel bad about ourselves”. In the past, I’ve used the “Prime Directive” from Norm Kerth’s book on Project Retrospectives. However, I’ve never really felt that the language resonated with people, and also feel like it didn’t reflect the way I currently think about organizations and systems, so I went searching around for some better language.

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Welcome

This is the new home for all my blogging where you’ll find out what I’m thinking.

I have far too many blogs scattered about, but I haven’t been happy with the themes/formatting and control that are available (Tumblr’s easy, but not flexible; WordPress.org doesn’t let me install certain themes, etc.), plus I want to make sure that everything I write is completely under my control (having learned my lesson from losing years of blogging entries on Blogsome, may you rest in pieces).

I’m not yet sure what I’ll do with what I’ve written elsewhere, but all new essays will go here. I have a separate blog that I’m calling “Jitterted’s TidBits” for things that are too long for Twitter, but too short to put here.

So welcome to Jitterted’s Thinking.