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Adventure Lab, part 3: 5 lessons learned on brainstorming

by spike on May 7, 2012 · 3 Comments

With teams formed and pressing ahead with the first assignment one of the first tasks on the list is idea generation. I’m sure some folks came to the course with a great idea, but what if you could increase your chances to find the right idea and get the opportunity to fully explore your team’s potential?

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been involved in a brainstorming session before even if you didn’t realise it was one. If it was any close to traditional brainstorming you were probably in a room with a few friends or colleagues, most likely in front of a whiteboard and one of you was frantically scribbling down as the rest of the team was blurting stuff out. This sounds all fine and dandy, except that it’s not. There are three main problems with a situation like that:

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AdVenturersLab no more. Long live The Adventure Lab

by spike on April 27, 2012 · 0 Comments

New teams are being formed in sight of the real beginning of the course next week and as I bid farewell to my old group I’m excited to join some awesome people in The Adventure Lab. This series has just got better, I promise you, so make sure you don’t miss a post.

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AdventurersLab, part 2: 5 top tools for collaboration

by spike on April 24, 2012 · 0 Comments

Team collaboration has been pivotal to the success of the project and with a lot of remote and distributed teams is worth to take a look at the tooling that made that collaboration possible. Read on to find out about the top 5 collaboration tools used by many teams and some tips and tricks.

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AdventurersLab, part 1: 5 lessons on team building

by spike on April 17, 2012 · 23 Comments

The first two weeks of the Venture Lab course centered around team building. This makes sense as people form groups in preparation for the real start next week. The teams were initially formed by random selection and in a lot of cases yielded poor results. But even with a difficult situation at hand you can still turn things around if you keep a few things in mind.

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AdventurersLab: documenting the Stanford Entrepreneurship course

by spike on April 10, 2012 · 4 Comments

Last year a spur of online courses was announced among which featured the Technology Entrepreneurship course offered by the Stanford University. I jumped on this as soon as I found out about it and started counting the days to launch like a kid counts the days to Christmas. The course got delayed twice, but has finally started almost two weeks ago and the first assignment is in progress. You might know engineers that over the years have [...]

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I’m not a rabid chef user, but I still love devops

by spike on March 31, 2012 · 2 Comments

It’s been a couple heated weeks on the devops front. In part due, again, to the NoOps debacle (see Cockcroft’s post and Allspaw’s reply) and for the other part due to this statement: [The devops list is] mostly folks who are users, developers, and fans of chef, puppet, similar tools. A few folks have a broader sense of operations. (Call me sensitive, but when I queried about management of shell scripts, I got jumped on by [...]

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Devops will steal your job. Or not.

by spike on March 13, 2012 · 1 Comments

It must have been at least five years ago, when puppet was getting popular, that I first ran into someone terrified of losing his job because of automation. I even wonder if the same happened before when cfengine came out, and history would suggest it probably did.  However, what also history suggests is that resourceful and competent engineers will always have a job. The devops movement, as heavily entrenched in automation as it is, seems to have [...]

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One big reason devops makes sense in a job title

by spike on February 14, 2012 · 9 Comments

We’ve been trying to grow our team for a few months now and the title we’re hiring for is Devops Engineer. One of the candidates our recruiters reached out to, let’s call him John, came back to us with a bunch of questions including: How do you feel about hiring someone with a devops title? It’s a very legittimate question, Devops is a cultural and professional movement, so how could it be a job title? [...]

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NoOps: the good, the fad and the ugly

by spike on February 3, 2012 · 10 Comments

When the term NoOps was coined by Forrester last April it stirred up a lot of controversy online, especially in the DevOps camp, and the $500 price tag didn’t certainly help to drive a good conversation. The discussion has been ongoing since then with no resolution and the on and off fight over twitter and various blogs. What I’m gonna argue is that except for the random troll, everybody is working toward the same goal [...]

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Why the year of ‘NoOps’ will never come

by spike on February 1, 2012 · 7 Comments

GigaOM just published an article titled Why 2013 is the year of ‘NoOps’ for programmers [Infographic] and since my comment doesn’t seem to show up (pending moderation apparently) I decided I might as well just reply on my blog. If you’re in a hurry here’s why that’s just not gonna happen: a PaaS is a wonderful thing that is giving an opportunity to ideas to see the light of the internet when otherwise they might have [...]

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  • About Me

    Hi, my name is Spike Morelli and this is my thinking lab. Over the past 13 years of career in the tech industry I've been a developer, a system engineer, a devops person, a manager and a startup owner. I've taken the best from each experience and brought it into the next, innovating and focusing on delivering value. I have a passion for sociology and communication, but above all I care about making people happy, it's incredibly rewarding and happy folks do the best work.

    Most of us wouldn't have done what we have done if we didn't have people around us to learn from, their experiences is what helped us grow, their passion our fuel. If that's also your experience let's make that circle bigger, reach out to me at fsm@spikelab.org or on twitter

  • Recent Posts

    • Adventure Lab, part 3: 5 lessons learned on brainstorming
    • AdVenturersLab no more. Long live The Adventure Lab
    • AdventurersLab, part 2: 5 top tools for collaboration
    • AdventurersLab, part 1: 5 lessons on team building
    • AdventurersLab: documenting the Stanford Entrepreneurship course
  • Tags

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