I was invited on Tuesday evening to watch a tradition here at NewHelix. Every Tuesday and Thursday nights during the summer the staff get together for a fun basketball game at a local park. During the day the staff take up a collection to pay for the lights on the court. Two hours of lights run 200 pesos which comes out to less than $5 US, not a bad deal.I sat on the sidelines and watched the guys play. A priority for me on this trip was to learn the personalities of the developers supporting WorthPoint. This became a great opportunity to learn more about them. As they played I could see traits of natural leadership skills, who followed up their shots, who called out for the ball, who hustled and other traits that can relate to how a person can work in a team atmosphere.
Tonight is their Thursday game and they've convinced me to come join them on the court, not just from the sidelines. My next blog post will be from the Iligan hospital where I'll be recovering from my heart attack. Talk to you then.
Enjoy a couple of videos from Tuesday night's game.
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As much as we in the USA believe we have heightened security measures its a real eye-opener to visit an area like Mindanao. Armed security guards are a way of life here in every aspect of public life. Men in uniform wielding M-1 rifles, machine guns, shotguns and sidearms are commonplace. The one main difference I've noticed here from the other similar areas of the world I've visited are the guard's personality. In the middle east and other high violence areas security personnel are not at all friendly, they speak...you listen. Here in Mindanao the security staff carry the same air of authority but they do it in a very polite and friendly manner. They truly appear to be here to protect and serve.
From stepping off the plane I was immediately approached by the local police representative at the airport to inquire about my purpose of being here and to ensure that someone I trusted was going to meet me there. I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette with him and he showed me a poster listing the most wanted terrorists in
Mindanao, each accused of kidnapping or other heinous crime. This wasn't a scare tactic as much as his way to let me know this was something to take seriously. He seemed very much relieved when I talked about our NewHelix staff and how I was going to be working with them the whole time I was here.Armed guards at the entrance to the local mall in Cagayan de Oro:
And another at the local Jollibee (our version of MickeyDees):
Both of these examples had shotguns present. Needless to say I'm going to exercise some caution while I'm here.
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Yes I know what you're thinking, I already have a Day One entry. Well I realized that my actual first day covered 30+ hours including crossing the International Date Line so I deserve to have two Day One entries.The trip from Manilla to Cagayan went well especially since it only lasted 1 hour 20 minutes. After landing I was met by Aldrin Valdellon and Alex Perez who drove me the rest of the way to the NewHelix offices in Iligan City. We traveled through the rural areas of northern Mindanao that includes protected forests and rice paddys. I noticed lots of livestock like cows, goats, chickens and even a few water buffalo.
There wasn't much wildlife other than birds to be seen but we did have one visitor. A giant spider the size of my
head jumped up on my passenger side window and tried to break the glass so he could eat me. Ok ok, maybe he was only 4 inches across and maybe he wasn't trying to eat me but you couldn't convince me of that at the time. It was unnerving seeing this monstrosity that close to my face with only a 1/4 inch piece of glass separating us. He eventually gave up and left the vehicle. I think I saw him bring down a water buffalo in my rear view mirror.The afternoon was spent meeting with the leadership of NewHelix and coming to agreement on the goals we wanted to achieve during my visit. They broke down as follows (in no particular order of priority):
That covers my priorities for being here. Time permitting we will also address:
- Establish a new organization chart with improved local management chains
- Conduct in-depth review of the SCRUM process we have experienced to-date
- Establish and conduct a SCRUM meeting daily
- Review and improve current software test processes
- Review and improve current metric reporting system (Pentaho)
- Conduct personnel reviews on staff supporting WorthPoint
- Establish regression testing process through the use of Selenium
- Discuss future plans for the WorthPoint widget
I'll cover our progress here. Before dusk sets on my final day here I'm hoping to have made great progress on many (if not all) of these areas.
- Visual design concepts
- Programmatic design concepts
- Review and document build procedures
- Review and document our configuration management processes
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It's 8:45 AM and I'm sitting in a coffee shop in the Manilla airport wrapping up a cheese and cracker tray. So far so good on the WorthPoint trip to Iligan City. I left Dulles International Saturday afternoon at 6:00 PM on American Airlines to Los Angeles. That 5 hour trip was just a precursor to the Los Angeles to Guam to Manilla marathon flight on Philippine Air. 16 hours. Thats 21 hours without a cigarette. Ok...Ok...I hear you. I shouldn't be smoking anyway.The Manilla airport has a very Singapore feel to it. It is extremely clean, I cannot find one piece of trash anywhere inside or outside the terminal. The airline representatives and terminal security guards are all very helpful and friendly. I've actually had two guards come up to me and ask if I needed any assistance (I didn't think I looked that
lost).Manilla has the smell of burnt oil and exhaust fumes that I've found in almost every port city I've visited throughout the world. Ecology Green has not taken root here yet. Taxis, buses and the delivery trucks I see are all spouting black smoke from their mufflers. Oh and if you visit here and walk around outside expect to be approached by every cabbie in the area asking if you need a ride.
My last flight takes off in about an hour taking me to Cagayan de Oro. There I'll be met by some NewHelix folks who will bring me to Iligan.
I should reach NewHelix at 2:00 and I've got my first WorthPoint meeting scheduled at 3:00. No sense in wasting time, may as well jump in as soon as I get there. No matter how rough the trip here is, its definitely worth doing. I'm looking forward to working face-to-face with my developers and setting up process to improve our Skype communications in the future.In a little over 5 hours my 30-something hour trek will be concluded for the trip out. I don't want to think about having to do it all over again on the way home.
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Today I say goodbye to the USA as I travel to the island of Mindanao in
the Philippines. I will be visiting the cities of Iligan City and
Cagayan de Oro. The purpose of this trip is to spend some time with my off-shore developers at NewHelix in Iligan. NewHelix supports WorthPoint in the development and maintenance of our public-facing site along with many other efforts on the back end that our visitors never see.When I first started at WorthPoint my first responsibility was to establish an Agile development methodology between the requirements providers (product owners), management and our NewHelix developers. The implementation has been received with mixed reviews, some good and others identifying room for improvement. My CTO, Andy Forbes, and I both realized that we could not reach the level we required in our development efforts without some face to face communications. Skype is a great resource but can only facilitate communication to a certain extent. Cultural and language differences, though they are fewer when working with a Philippine company, do not help either. I've found it increasingly difficult to present certain concepts like design, development and management techniques. This trip is for me to present the WorthPoint expectations, identify areas of improvement, encourage the areas they are currently doing well, and then ensure that the information is received correctly on their end. Once this is accomplished then Skype communications should flow much easier. I do plan on making recurring visits though not as long as this first one.
Travel to Mindanao is not trivial matter. I've gone through my rounds of immunizations, fought the passport office, taking my Malaria pills, researched the area on Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube. To be completely honest I'd rather be heading to Tahiti but Iligan will do for now. This is an area of the world I've never had a chance to explore. My Navy days had me spending time all over the Atlantic, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. I have to thank WorthPoint for this opportunity to expand my cultural experience.Funny story...I went to get my Typhoid immunization and the doctor reviewed what I should look out for while I was there. She covered Malaria and Dengue fever, both spread by mosquitoes. It appears the mosquitoes in Mindanao have their own version of a labor union. The Dengue fever carrying kind come out during the day and at dusk they go home and the Malaria group take over. I had to laugh, it reminded me of the old Warner Brothers cartoons where the sheep dogs clocked in and out to protect the sheep from the coyote.
So today I commence my journey by spending the next 30 hours either in flight or in an airport. Check back for more journal entries throughout my trip. I'll see you on the other side!
If you have stories to share about a visit you've made to the Philippines I'd love to hear them.
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Last night I had the pleasure of emceeing a tech forum where Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia, Inc. gave a very informative presentation of his views on overall trends in the content management
market, specifically in Drupal as a social publishing system and how his company is forging the future for Drupal into commercial marketplaces. His presentation can be found here.
From Jeff's Twitter feed: Completed a webcast to a Drupal meetup in virginia. Seemed to go well. Good questions.
Frank Febrarro of Phase2 Technology then demonstrated a module they have recently released for Calais. The Calais web service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including Entities like People and Companies and Events & Facts like Acquisitions and Management Changes. Phase 2 has integrated this service as a module for Drupal 5 and 6. You can watch a short screencast Frank recorded to demo main features of the module.
Toward the end we as a group decided to keep this meeting rolling as the Drupal Northern Virginia Users Group. We are targeting the second Tuesday of the month. This forum will be very much dependent on audience participation for suggestions of topics and also utilizing a rotating emcee. If you're interested in Drupal we would love to have you join us.
Here are some pictures from last night's event:
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From Jeff's Twitter feed: Completed a webcast to a Drupal meetup in virginia. Seemed to go well. Good questions.
Frank Febrarro of Phase2 Technology then demonstrated a module they have recently released for Calais. The Calais web service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including Entities like People and Companies and Events & Facts like Acquisitions and Management Changes. Phase 2 has integrated this service as a module for Drupal 5 and 6. You can watch a short screencast Frank recorded to demo main features of the module.
Toward the end we as a group decided to keep this meeting rolling as the Drupal Northern Virginia Users Group. We are targeting the second Tuesday of the month. This forum will be very much dependent on audience participation for suggestions of topics and also utilizing a rotating emcee. If you're interested in Drupal we would love to have you join us.
I'd like to thank Teqcorner for providing the space for us along with Andy Forbes and Arman Anwar of WorthPoint for their invaluable assistance in coordinating this event.
For more information on future meetings, to suggest topics, volunteer to host or make a presentation please contact me at marc.benton@worthpoint.com.
Here are some pictures from last night's event:
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As the WorthPoint Product Development Manager I get to work on all aspects of our site. One of the more enjoyable projects is the design and development of our widget. You can see it over here in my right rail ------->
Our widget development team is led by Jeremy Ancog who has a deep background in graphic design and Flash development. Being a social network junkie like myself, he utilizes such services as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. (Speaking of Facebook, look for the WorthPoint page there soon and become a fan. We'll announce it here when available.) He also has experience as a Second Life developer, skills I hope to take advantage of in the future. All of this experience and interest come to bear on this effort. We look forward to where he and his team takes our widget in the coming months.
Our plans for the widget in the coming weeks include deployment to MySpace and Facebook, and a widget configuration page where you can choose the type of feed you want displayed. Future enhancements will include more choices in data feeds, increased designs to choose from, and calendaring functionality to display upcoming events.The code to deploy the widget using our standard feed is currently available. Last night I embeded the widget here and it fit quite nicely. If you would like to use it on your own site the code is listed below. Let me know if you employ it so we can promote your site.
I am interested in what you think could be improved both in the widget and with WorthPoint in general. Please let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Marc...
---------
Embed this line in your sites HTML templates for the WorthPoint widget:
<div id="flashcontent_xmlwidget"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.worthpoint.com/sites/all/modules/xmlwidget/xmlwidget.swf" style="" id="xmlwidget" name="xmlwidget" quality="high" wmode="transparent" flashvars="env=http://www.worthpoint.com" height="300" width="200"></div>
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Its been an extremely interesting few months since leaving my last job. Changes abounded in every aspect of my life, some good...some not so great.
At my last organization I was almost completely focused on CMS implementations, ignoring most of the other aspects of website development. CMS work is nice, its the backbone of the internet, but I was missing the application engagements that precipitates true user interaction. After leaving there one of my first adventures was attending the New New Internet conference in my hometown of Reston, VA. I was introduced to (or should I say immersed in) social media and the reality of Web 2.0. My next few months entailed my engagement in the Facebooks and Twitters of the web, more usage of my LinkedIn account, and a presence at multiple local tech activities. I've met and interacted both in person and over the internet with many great people, too many to list here.
My challenge became finding a position that leveraged the two. Most social media positions today are in the marketing and PR domain. Unless I wanted to start my career over from the ground up I did not see those domains as options. Weeks became months which became quarters while I looked for that job. I then stumbled across a local startup named WorthPoint.
WorthPoint is a social media site that catalogues and tracks the sales history and current value of antiques and collectibles from around the world, and makes this information available to everyone. Anne Zeiger stated "The company is gaining significant visitor traction and is well poised to capture the lion's share of this untapped market."
Thats the company's story. For me it's the perfect match I was looking for.
We utilize Drupal as our CMS. Well utilize is the wrong word, we actually push Drupal up to and beyond its intended limits. We provide a plethora of tools and features for collectors of every domain. Communities that include user abilities to list items in their collections, videos of them, mixing of professional knowledge along with wisdom of crowd knowledge, blogging, buying and selling, along with a deep database of historic data on auction items called the Worthopedia. Thats just the short list of features, there's more in the works (whoops, I almost said worx. old habits huh?).
Whats my role in this you may ask? They've asked me to manage the product development and implement an Agile process using the tool Rally Dev. Our first sprint started today. I'm happy with the team so far as they've taken to the change in the way they work and the new tool. Rally Dev is an interesting application that I plan to cover in another post but I will say now that they have a great sales and support staff.
So for now I'm deep in the midst of a CMS driven social community application utilizing an Agile process with distributed teams all over the world. To quote some of my older relations back in Arkansas....I'm like a pig in shit!
Have you changed jobs recently?
At my last organization I was almost completely focused on CMS implementations, ignoring most of the other aspects of website development. CMS work is nice, its the backbone of the internet, but I was missing the application engagements that precipitates true user interaction. After leaving there one of my first adventures was attending the New New Internet conference in my hometown of Reston, VA. I was introduced to (or should I say immersed in) social media and the reality of Web 2.0. My next few months entailed my engagement in the Facebooks and Twitters of the web, more usage of my LinkedIn account, and a presence at multiple local tech activities. I've met and interacted both in person and over the internet with many great people, too many to list here.
My challenge became finding a position that leveraged the two. Most social media positions today are in the marketing and PR domain. Unless I wanted to start my career over from the ground up I did not see those domains as options. Weeks became months which became quarters while I looked for that job. I then stumbled across a local startup named WorthPoint.
WorthPoint is a social media site that catalogues and tracks the sales history and current value of antiques and collectibles from around the world, and makes this information available to everyone. Anne Zeiger stated "The company is gaining significant visitor traction and is well poised to capture the lion's share of this untapped market."
Thats the company's story. For me it's the perfect match I was looking for.
We utilize Drupal as our CMS. Well utilize is the wrong word, we actually push Drupal up to and beyond its intended limits. We provide a plethora of tools and features for collectors of every domain. Communities that include user abilities to list items in their collections, videos of them, mixing of professional knowledge along with wisdom of crowd knowledge, blogging, buying and selling, along with a deep database of historic data on auction items called the Worthopedia. Thats just the short list of features, there's more in the works (whoops, I almost said worx. old habits huh?).
Whats my role in this you may ask? They've asked me to manage the product development and implement an Agile process using the tool Rally Dev. Our first sprint started today. I'm happy with the team so far as they've taken to the change in the way they work and the new tool. Rally Dev is an interesting application that I plan to cover in another post but I will say now that they have a great sales and support staff.
So for now I'm deep in the midst of a CMS driven social community application utilizing an Agile process with distributed teams all over the world. To quote some of my older relations back in Arkansas....I'm like a pig in shit!
Have you changed jobs recently?
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