» A short riddle to test how biased you are. Telling you more about it would kind of give it away. Here is the riddle as text, the solution is in the video:

A father is about to bring his son to a job interview, applying for a position at a large stockbrokers company in the city. Just as they arrive at the company’s parking lot, the son’s phone rings. He looks at his father, who says: “Go ahead, answer it.”
The caller is the trading company’s CEO who says: “Good luck son, you’ve got this.”
The son ends the call and once again looks at his father, who is still next to him in their car.

How is this possible?

» Here is a list of all non-ACME brands from the Looney Tunes. You know, just in case you’ll ever need it.

» Nice little drum-off between Nandi Bushell and Dave Grohl.

It started with Nandi covering Everlong by the Foo Fighters, to which Dave responded with a challenge to cover Dead End Friends by Them Crooked Vultures. Nandi executed this challenge beautifully, and then Grohl wrote a song just for her.

Nandi is a kick-ass role model, and my daughters adore her. Well done!

» The future is now: Nokia to build mobile network on the moon. So the moon will get fast mobile internet before some spots in Germany? That is not quite the future I imagined!

» Here is a web quine- a website where the result looks the same as the source code. This is quite similar to an older example, which actually codes itself live.

» According to Gartner, overplanning is one of the 9 biggest digital business transformation mistakes:

Transforming to digital is more about doing than planning. Organizations can get caught up in endless rounds of analysis paralysis, which slows the transformation project. To combat this, organizations should institutionalize lean startup thinking at every level.

» I have moved the Product Owner Q&A to a separate space on this page, where I will continue collecting questions and answers in relation to Product Ownership.

» More vibes from the early 00s: This blog posts screenshots from old GeoCities pages, one at a time.

» Miss that warm fuzzy feeling of the early 2000s? Get it back by browsing this museum of Winamp skins.

» 4 rules for intuitive UX, specifically (also) meant for developers. These rules are:

1. Obey the Law of Locality
2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
3. Pass the Squint Test
4. Teach by example

All these rules come with great and examples.

» Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future.

» Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?, authored by StackOverflow, which in itself is reason enough to read it.

I think one of the reasons why Scrum (or agility in general) has such as bad standing is because it tends to surface problems which are already there in the company, and makes them transparent. Consequently, it’s easier to shoot the messenger than to acknowledge and work on the problems.

» The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t.

Related to that is the Lindy Effect: The longer a technology has been around, the longer it is likely to stay around. This has implications on, among other things, architecture.

» If you don’t pay attention to tech trends, you end up with unexpected problems. Specifically, it seems that UK Phone Number Assignments have been handled within Yahoo! Groups - which has been shut down.

» Don’t ask an AI whether or not it’s alive.