JoseB Blog

 I don't know exactly when I decided I had to do this hike, but I think it started with a visit to the Grand Canyon with my kids when we hiked down one of the trails. We went maybe a half mile into the canyon and sat out on a huge rock alone to enjoy the view, the peace and the silence of the canyon for a while before going back up.  Years later, during COVID, I watched a lot of YouTube videos of people doing Rim To Rim hikes and that is when the thought of doing it entered my mind. I like setting big goals that give you something to work towards. A couple of years went by and then in the Spring of 2024, I decided the time was right to do it so I resolved to do the hike in the fall. As far as training for the hike, I was already in decent shape with playing tennis three times a week, the twice weekly circuit training and yoga classes. I also started hiking occasional five, seven and ten mile hikes, as well as going up and down outdoor flights of stairs for 30 minutes to an hou...

An IT Project Methodology describes how project work is identified, documented, assigned, tracked, tested, and deployed to end users.  At the start of my career, there was no true use of methodology. Requirements and tracking work was done in an ad hoc manner. A waterfall approach was used where all requirements, design, coding, testing, and deployment were done in their entirety one after the other.  This did not work well because by the time we got around to testing and the end users saw the app for the first time, often they would say, 'Hey this is not bad but really, it's not what we wanted, we wanted it like this instead, bla bla bla.' But by then the app was coded 100%, so it was too late to go back and do a rewrite because it would be too much work.  In the end, we would patch the app with band aids to give end users something resembling what they really wanted.  Later in my career, I was exposed to several methodologies including Method1, RUP, and eXtreme/Agi...

Here are the seven disciplines that you must get right, or the project will fail. This means if you get just one of these wrong but the rest right, the project will still fail. It's all or nothing. It's very unforgiving. It's like a chain, if one link fails, the whole chain fails. Methodology - how the project work is managed Requirements - what the app will do Architecture and Design - the foundational structure of the app User Interface - what end users see and interact with Coding - self explanatory Testing - self explanatory Environments and Deployment - how the app moves from development to production We will dive deeper into all of these in later articles, but for now the question becomes, "How do we guarantee that we succeed in each discipline?" The answer is that there must be one person on the team that is responsible and accountable for making sure that quality is maintained in each discipline.   We will get into the different roles of the project team m...

I graduated from college in 1978 as a Computer Science major and worked in IT for forty-one years, retiring in 2019. In my career I programmed apps on everything from standalone mainframes to internet connected phones. In 2001, I was somewhat reluctantly promoted to IT Management at a large company employing hundreds in the IT Department and that is where all my technical project management experience comes from. There, I was exposed to many different IT methodologies, and thru trial and error, I arrived at a development approach that worked well. It borrowed mostly from agile / extreme methodologies, but also borrowed some of the useful RUP artifacts such as the Use Case and the UML Class and Sequence diagrams.  I managed a team of custom app developers, and it took years of hard knocks to learn what worked and what didn't, but in the end the driving force was always to BE PRACTICAL and only do those things that provided value in terms of making the project succeed, so agilit...

I met Hite sometime around 1978 after I graduated college and started working at my first real job. I started hanging out with a crowd at Howie’s place on Holly St, where the so-called Holly Street crowd would party and have fun. The first thing that struck me about Hite was that he was a cool guy, but he was kind to everybody. It didn’t matter who you were, Hite treated everyone the same, with respect and kindness. Prior to Hite, I was used to cool people only associating with other cool people and shunning others, so he broke the mold.  And if we ever made fun of someone or applied peer pressure to try to make them do something they didn’t want to, Hite would defend that person and tell them in front of everybody, ‘Stand your ground, my man, don’t do anything you don’t want to’.  Hite would literally give you the shirt off his back, which he did one day when I told him I wanted to get a Piggly Wiggly t-shirt like his and he took it off and said, ‘This is for you.’  I ha...

 We've been dealing with this COVID thing now for almost two years. Now we've been hit with the OMICRON mutation which is spreading like wildfire and vaccines offer limited protection.  I've come to the realization that the 'new normal' going forward will be all about coping and living with pandemics.  More mutations will likely come and besides even if the pandemic goes away you will never catch me in a plane or any indoor crowded place without a mask, much like the Japan and Korea have always done.  Why catch colds and influenza when a simple mask will protect you? Once you get used to a mask its not that bad at all.  So here are my points about the new normal to help us cope with disease spreading. If we've learned anything, it's that shutting down the economy for a disease that has a kill ratio of less than 2% doesn't make sense because of the harm it causes to livelihoods, mental health, education, etc...  Shutting down the economy does way more har...

Stephen Hawking was a great scientist and thinker. I enjoyed watching his science shows on TV. I have been profoundly influenced by him from a philosophical point of view (although Stephen would call it science, not philosophy) and would like to share three things he helped me understand that I think are true and very fundamental. Every choice you make is predetermined, free will is an illusion. This is hard to believe at first but if you understand the concept of a state machine then it is easy to understand. A state machine is a system where given a certain set of inputs and a certain state, the next state and outputs are be predetermined by an algorithm.  A car's 4 speed transmission would be an example. Its has 4 states (gears). Given the current gear it's in, and taking the car's current RPM and acceleration as input, the algorithm chooses the next gear.  Life's choices are like the car's transmission. When you make a decision, you think you have free will, but...