Show and Tell Friday

Today’s Show and Tell is brief – I have many writing projects keeping me good and busy!

First, check out Todd Tibbetts’ blog Exit Strategy News: Nuggets for Knowledge Workers where you’ll see a whiteboard that’s at least a busy as mine and enjoy flash backs to the creative boom of the early dotcom era via Todd’s own cartoon art.

Lisa Kastner at Humna Humna shares a listing of Writers Forums for writers in the Philadelphia area for the next few months.  (And remember, if you’re in the Philadelphia area you can join us for our monthly writers’ critique group).

Diane M. Schuller is planning a garden labyrinth at her blog Alberta Postcards, Conspire to Inspire where she invites us to “use what talents you possess” in the words of Henry Van Dyke.

And in other news, the Festival of the Trees will be hosted in March at Orchards Forever.  If you’re looking for a topic to inspire you, here’s what our March host Peg is cooking up:

“I’d like to try and adhere to a theme of fruit trees and orchards… but virtually anything that is even loosely connected to that theme is welcome! Gardening and growing, horticulture, heirloom fruits, food and recipes, environmental and conservation issues, folklore and mythology, travel, what have you!”

Create a post and send your links to amberapple [at] gmail [dot] com or visit the Festival of the Trees coordinating blog for more information.

For me: back to work!  For you: have an excellent weekend.

Monday Morning Muse

Monday Morning Muse

Today’s Monday Morning Muse is going to break with our traditional images, and instead give us one of our first forays into the technological arts.

If you aren’t a computer geek, or you don’t know any, you may not have had a chance to learn what a creative, dynamic, intuitive bunch they are.

Here is a great example to help spark the creative (or at least admire it in others) compliments of Martin Fowler:

Martin Fowler is, by his own description, “an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development.”

In his Bliki, Fowler has a discussion about Contiguous Integration.  For all the non-techies in the audience, I’ll do my best to summarize “contiguous integration” with this example, sans whiteboard:

Imagine you’re working with a team to design and build a computer system.  Each of you has a particular piece: Jill writes frontend code, Jaya integrates business rules, and Jojo builds the backend database, etc., etc.

Now, as each team member works on their piece, imagine that they can upload their most recent changes to a network in realtime (as opposed to just building away in their little dungeon, only to emerge months later and hope that all the pieces fit together).

With contiguous integration, each team member updates their piece of functionality in realtime, and all updates and changes are automatically checked in to the system and tested against all the other current pieces of functionality.

If the new changes work, everyone’s sitting pretty.  But if, for example, Jaya updates a business rule that collides with a piece of Jill’s code, the test fails, and the whole system “breaks” until the conflict is resolved.

So how does everyone keep abreast of the team’s progress? 

In Fowler’s discussion on the methodologies of Contiguous Integration, he relates a really cool anecdote concerning a Lava lamp.  Check out the segment, “Everyone Can See What’s Happening,” and let us know what you think!

PS – Today’s image is a charcoal drawing I made for an art class about 10 years ago.