by Ron Jeffries on Agile Software Development ISBN:1941222374 (more)

Author of Free Agent Nation (Free Agent) and others (more)

Past and present reads. See esp. Greatest Books (more)

This adorable, Spock-inspired chatbot wants to talk about your mental health (more)

Robin Sloan: House of Cards (CardDeck) (more)

Chat-style super-short Fiction maker. (cf CardDeck) http://www.hooked.co/

Collection of cards, DeckOfCards (more)

Back in 2005, the AP noted that many people in Japan were reading books (Thin Book) on their Mobile-s. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card... In the latest versions, cell-phone novels are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications... A recent marketing study by Bandai found that more than half the readers are female, and many are reading cell-phone books in their homes... A writer who goes by the single name Yoshi wrote Deep Love, a series of stories about a Tokyo teenage prostitute. He began by posting them on an obscure cell-phone site he started and made reader payment voluntary... It went on to become a movie, TV show and Manga, or Japanese-style Comic Book. It's even been turned into a real Printed Book, with some 2.6 million copies sold. (more)

Michael D. Hill tweetstorm framing RoadMap process as "Endpointing". Endpointing is over-focus on eventual destination. in s/w, it's seeing development as a long trip to a known destination on a known map.. Within a few weeks, predictability virtually vanishes... and just as we're moving, so is it (the destination). it isn't just the market that changes, it's really everything related to our vision, including us... it encourages us to make commitments we can't possibly keep. that in turn encourages lots of very counter-productive behavior... it encourages us to mislead. we mislead ourselves, each other, our customers, our shareholders... i work hard to avoid words like "evil", but this is a kind of structural madness... optimize for small doable/undoable steps. optimize for motivation, the engine that keeps us going... give 75% of your attention to this week, 20% to this month, and 5% to this year... harvest every inch of value you find every step of the way by handing it to customers... the opposite of "endpointing" is "next-stepping". train people in these ideas, AT EVERY LEVEL. they're relevant in code, process, planning.

Agile Software Development coach http://geepawhill.org/ (more)

Michael D. Hill has a series of TweetStorm-s about a RAMPS (Rhythm, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, and Safety) model of Software Development team Motivation: make great software by making great teams. (more)

KHole report 3 (Jan'2013?) http://khole.net/issues/03/ (more)

KHole report 4 (Oct'2013): Youth Mode http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/ (more)

KHole Report 5 (Aug'2015) on Doubt http://khole.net/issues/05/ (more)

Amazon Web Services - joining the IOS Platform competition? (more)

End-of-life chatbot can help you with difficult final decisions | New Scientist (more)

James Clear: Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year (more)

Venkatesh Rao on Dan Pink's book Drive about Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation. I do wish though, that the book had dived into the why more deeply. The “Seven Deadly Flaws,” like I said, are merely a succinct restatement of the empirical results. They do not constitute an analysis. Neither does the SDT (Self Determination Theory) idea (which seems vaguely like Maslow in a new package). The book moves a little too rapidly from diagnosis to prescription. The prescription is based on an extrapolation from “carrots and sticks are bad” to “goals are bad,” a stronger assertion that I happen to agree with. But the incomplete diagnosis leads to problems at this point: we get a prescription based on the idea of “PurPose,” a close cousin of “goal” which I don’t think gets us anywhere. Purposes are merely somewhat softer and more abstract goals that sound more lofty and noble and suggest a hint of religion (as in the Christian bestseller, “The PurposeDrivenLife”). It’s just holy carrots and sticks or “mission statements” and “values.”... My theory is that adult drive is nothing more than comprehensively hooked childish curiosity that has led play down an interesting rabbit hole (or a virtuous spiral), so we end up putting in Ten K Hours of Ericssonian Deliberate Practice and turning into driven adults, Passionate about chemistry or steam engines or whatever. This argument is present in the book, but buried and lost among many other narrative threads. It should have been front-and-center. (more)

see SquareUp for payment processor (more)

Review of Four Futures: Life After Capitalism – will robots bring utopia or terror? ISBN:1781688133 (more)