Thinking

I drink this Cross Fox Espresso roast in honor of my #UP2US14 friends, especially @aaronesilvers & @meganbowe – “what does the fox drink?”

— Brian Dusablon (@briandusablon) March 22, 2014

Above us is The Fox, our logo for Up to All of Us, courtesy of our friend, Jason Early. The fox’s cunning and its ability to work as part of a skulk (or leash… Google it) is heavy on our minds. In fact, we’ve spent the entire week since returning home from North Carolina following up on the things big and small we’ve been charged with. With renewed wind in our sails, we’re focused and stoked.

Linking

Our friend, Brad Wilkening of DevMynd shared this link from John Allspaw of Etsy, on building what he calls a “Just Culture” at Etsy. The focus of this post was on “Blameless Post-Mortems” which breaks the dysfunctional cycle of punishment in figuring out what goes wrong on projects. Instead, “a funny thing happens when engineers make mistakes and feel safe when giving details about it: they are not only willing to be held accountable, they are also enthusiastic in helping the rest of the company avoid the same error in the future. They are, after all, the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items. So technically, engineers are not at all ‘off the hook’ with a blameless PostMortem process. They are very much on the hook for helping Etsy become safer and more resilient, in the end. And lo and behold: most engineers I know find this idea of making things better for others a worthwhile exercise.” http://bit.ly/1hlb3JN

Doing

On Wednesday, March 26, I’m hosting our second IEEE xAPI Study Group meeting as a Google+ Hangout-on-air. It’s an open group focused on implementation practices and challenges, starting at 11am Eastern.

Last weekend was our third annual gathering of Up to All of Us. Our recap was here in case you missed it.