Randomization Works! Watch this...

For my innaugural post of 2007*, I decided to wait for the Chinese New Year. Hey, why not? I have also decided to do something new: Randomize.

Occasionally, I send short "inspirational" videos to my teams in an often vain and frequently futile attempt to amuse, inspire, enliven, and inform their work on the mind-blowingly awesome sites and services that we are developing.

Last Week's Inspirational Video 2/14/2007
"Let's get on the hump, boys."
- Captain Kong, in Stanley Kubrick's immortal Dr. Strangelove.

click here to view the clip
 (get it? "hump"-tendre...)

My teams build social software for technical professionals. As such, we are blessed. We are also, sometimes, full of it. In advance of upcoming v1 releases, this Spring, I plan to "inspire" each of my sleep-deprived, stressed-out but nevertheless well-showered teammates, on at least a weekly basis. I've also decided to share my missives with you and the rest of the world.

Why randomize only ten world-class software developers and testers when I can randomize thousands of you?

This Week's Video Inspirational Video
"NO! This is COUNTER-dependency training…"
click here to view the clip
Date: 2/21/2007

If you work in the tech industry, my weekly video postings and my annotations thereto could give you a chuckle, summon a yawn, evoke an aha!, or convince you to eschew my blog, forever. But... If you take a step back, you might also get a pretty good sense of "where we are" in the development process and the prevailing mood of the team. Over time, I imagine that these videos/comments could, in combination, take on a life of their own and become an epic poem in which the informal histories of our software development projects are encoded, for posterity. Nahhhh.

*Where in the world has Korby Parnell been since December 2006? Short Answer: at my desk in Redmond mostly, making hay, hanging out with my lovely daughter, reading/tagging/reading, dreaming, getting back in touch with my customers' [_your_] pain, drawing up wireframes and breaking them down into scenarios and decomposing them into stories and disaggregating them into tasks and..., and refueling my blogine for 2007. How have you been? Well and happy, I hope!