Monday, July 23, 2012

Applied scrum

Maybe this wall in our kitchen could have had also another name, considering the frustration that sometimes is floating around our heads. Frustration due to a quite big amount of tasks that we have to deal with, short deadlines, interfaces that are not alwasy very easy to deal with and also the will to actually enjoy ourselves, there and then, and take care of babies, cats, friends and family.
Summary: it doesn't feel like we are not at work!
Our scrum board
Just to strenghten this feeling, Mattias made a quite crazy, but very useful suggestion: to apply scrum or something similar to our "project".
Considering the amount of resources (us) and everything else, I built up something very simple that resemble a scrum board, we filled in an excel sheet-backlog, and, after an intense analysis + sprint planning, we started to have our daily scrum meetings during breakfast. 

The result is that we are actually having a vision (common) of what we need to do and that we finally prioritize right. It has always been too easy to just take the quick/nice/easy tasks and leave the boring/big/I have no clue where to start from one lying around to rotten. 

So, Scrum has saved us! However, I'd prefer if we could get more resources...

PS: for the ones that have no clue, Scrum is a methodology for developing software. Google it!

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Have breakfast in the kitchen!

After many years of eating breakfast standing or carrying all the world (e.g. plates and food) around to find a table, we have improved our life quality by buying a table that we have placed in the kitchen.
Our decision process was slow as always, of course, and it implied going to a couple of shops.

White, old style, not too big. These were the characteristics we had in mind and I had a quite good picture of what we were looking for when we were already at Ilva, and we came up with this table:
Right now, I am in a "second hand" period. Hence, before giving my approval for the purchase, I spent some time surfing on Blocket, first finding exactly that table (with chairs), which were however already sold (then, remove the ad from the web, lazy! ;) ) and then finding another one, without chairs.
After contacting the owner, we decided to go there and see the table and ta-da the purchase took place.
The table was used in a restaurant on the shore of Ringsjön and with it, we got also 6 very nice Äppletstolarna (apple chairs).
Breakfast time!

Detail of the Äppletstol

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

A new mobile phone

Or maybe not!
This is what we have found today when inspecting some second hand shop in Kalmar.

It is about time to make some serious bakelite phone call as in the 30s... :)