Once in awhile you get shown the light,  in the strangest of places if you look at it right. Grateful Dead, “Scarlet Begonias” There are a handful of valuable insights and practices I first encountered studying Art Education at the undergraduate level that have proven relevant across other disciplines I have waded in since that time. One such nugget is the routine of carefully observing what has happened and what is happening within your field. Put simply: the habit of looking. In this particular class—The History and Practice of Art Education—the instructor split our time 50/50 between studying the nuts and bolts of the title content and looking at and Read more

Programming and software engineering attract introverted, introspective types of people. This work doesn’t require much social interaction, so it’s natural that it would attract those who aren’t comfortable communicating. Why? Let’s lay out a few reasons: Read more

A current trend among Java developers is to move the user interface entirely to the browser. Using Angular framework on the front end is one of the most popular ways to achieve this. This post will help Java developers integrate their Spring boot applications with Angular 4. Let’s create a bootstrapped application using Spring Initializr. Read more

This month I attended a DrupalCamp in Lutsk in western Ukraine. I would like to share my impressions of the conference. Typically, the common way to hold Drupal Camps in Ukraine is a bit boring.  I presented there myself and noticed there was little interaction with the audience and not much feedback. But Slava Merezhko had a great idea, turning his presentation “Let’s resolve a SOW” into a practical seminar. First, the audience was split in several different teams. Read more

You’ve probably heard this before. Perhaps it was just after you graduated from university with a degree in an ever-changing field. Or perhaps it was the first line of someone’s speech right before he introduced something innovative. In the world today, especially in the tech world, the worker must never stop building out his/her skillset. Every day innovations in technology make our lives easier and reduce the need for previously well-paid skilled labor. Think about it: when’s the last time you talked to a travel agent? What about a telephone operator? A crop farmer? A coal miner? Sure, these positions still exist, but they are in steep decline. So what Read more

The retrospective meeting is one of the most important scrum events. A team can understand their strengths and weaknesses, discuss their relationships between each other, and set goals for improvement beginning with the next sprint. You can find tons of different information on how to conduct retrospective meeting: who should participate, what’s the order of discussions, what to do with conclusions made during the meeting, etc. But the event itself can remain uninformative and boring if not done well. So I’d like to share 5 ways to spend this couple of hours with your team. These activities and others can be found on a great site called Fun Retrospectives and Read more