JoseB Blog

No this is not what you're thinking, this is about religion and God. I am turning 70 this year, am retired, accountable to no one, and no longer need to lay low about my beliefs. If you are very devout, you may not want to read this. Not for any reason other than if you have just one iota of doubt about your faith, it might be upsetting. One thing about my DNA is that I have always been a very skeptical person. In order for me to believe something I have to either see it, or its proof. Probably the one event in my life that profoundly reinforced my skepticism was when I found out the whole Christmas Santa Claus thing was a ruse last year, (ha ha, ok, I was six years old). No, it did not traumatize me in any way. What it did was that I resolved never to be fooled like that again. When I attended church I noticed the similarity between religion and Santa Claus. They are both based upon the reward system. If you are a good boy/girl you'll get presents, and if bad you'll get co...

This is my story of dealing with the deaths of my older brother Macu, my mom, and discovering I had  Crohn disease, all within a three-year period. Starting in my early fifties, probably sometime around the year 2010, it seemed like every autumn I would get these low-grade fevers accompanied by persistent diarrhea that would last for a month or two.  The annoying thing was that it didn't make me sick enough to not work, so I still went to work and just powered through the day best I could. Anyways I could not miss weeks from work. I would end up getting used to living with it as I had no other choice, but it really sapped my energy levels. This went on year after year. Of course, I went to doctors, they ran tests but were never able to determine why I was getting sick. I remember my primary care physician saying that there's definitely something brewing there. In late July of 2016, my brother Macu was sick and needed to be taken to the hospital. I picked him up at his Miami Be...

 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...