Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Merry Christmas, CollabNet

This holiday season, with so much reduced staffing, reduced scheduling, and outright unemployment in the workplace, I find myself especially thankful to have a job. And not just any job, but a job I genuinely enjoy. (Who wouldn't enjoy a job where you get to work — from home, even — on awesome free software such as Subversion?!) I've made some of my dearest friends and experienced some of my favorite moments through this job. That's just cool.

But as I reflect on the season — on the birth of Christ, on goodwill and peace on earth, and so on — I'm especially thankful for a job at a company that doesn't embarrass me. I don't find myself wrestling with my own conscience as I accept that paycheck. Sure, there have been times when I questioned certain methods or approaches, but (as I told my immediate supervisor this morning, actually) I've always been permitted to do so freely, always found my management chain very receptive to my input, and always found that — at least in the interactions I've been privy to — behaving honorably was the desired goal even when doing so might cost us a sales lead or a nice press release opportunity. As society ages and the almighty dollar continues to amass worshipers, I suspect that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for employees to say nice things about their employers (with a straight face, at least).

So thank you, CollabNet, for providing me the luxury of not just a great job, but one which doesn't force me to make ethical compromises. I don't know what the future holds for our relationship, but my family and I are grateful for the ride thus far.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Working For Good

For as long as I can remember, I've heard Romans 8:28 heralded from church pulpits with no small amount of regularity. Here's the text, if you don't know it already:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (KJV)

And again, in another translation (the one I most commonly read):

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,a whob have been called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (NIV)

What a powerful verse, right?! And so many applications, from motivation to comfort to conviction (at least according to the various pastors I've heard speak about the verse). Check it out:

  • Is life without meaning? Nope. God has a purpose for you.
  • What do I get out of loving God? Good stuff happens!
  • Why did God make SOME_BAD_THING happen? It wasn't really a bad thing, you just haven't seen the good in it yet.
  • Nono. It's really a bad thing. So why did God make SOME_BAD_THING happen? Um... are you not loving God enough? KA-BOOM!

Pretty cool stuff, huh? It's like a spiritual bat utility belt (Bible Belt? Ewww...).

But did you notice those footnote markers up there in the NIV version? I didn't. At least not until tonight. The footnote markers each denote different ways that the text could have been interpreted and translated from the original sources. Check out how the verse reads if you substitute the alternate translation marked "b":

And we know that in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good—with those who have been called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (NIV)

Whoa! It's like a whole different verse now. Suddenly the responsibility for bringing about good in the world falls back in our laps. We no longer just get to live a detached existence, loving God in a vacuum and ignoring those around us and then reaping all the resulting good stuff. Now we have to work — with God, who we of course still love — to bring about that good for ourselves and for others.

Quite honestly, I rather like that interpretation much better. It somehow seems more… logical; more consistent with the action-demonstrated kind of faith championed elsewhere throughout Scripture. What do you think?

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Shooting Stars

Youth soccer season is here again, and my youngest son couldn't be happier. His team (and seventeen others in his age bracket!) will take the field this Saturday as the first matches of the Harrisburg Parks and Recreation Fall 2010 Youth Soccer season take place. Okay, I confess — I'm pretty excited, too. This is my first season as a head coach in this age bracket, but I've assisted at this level for two years now. I easily have as much fun as the kids do!

This season, our team chose the name "Shooting Stars" (which was actually suggested by my wife), and as has become the routine, I managed to squirrel away 30 seconds to whip up a general logo design (once again composed on the table cover at Supper Restaurant) and then a couple of hours of digitization time.

Here's the final Shooting Stars Soccer Club logo:

… and the sketch that served as its humble roots:

UPDATE 9/7/2010: My patch order is in. Once again, the fine folks at Team Jedi Marketing have done a great job with the order:

Friday, April 16, 2010

Hot Lava

I caved. I couldn't take the pressure. In a moment of Crayola insanity — an opportunity once again afforded by the wait for delicious food at Supper — I submitted to forces beyond my control and scratched out a logo design for my son's soccer team, the Hot Lava:

I snapped the above photo with my not-so-featureful-or-powerful camera phone and emailed it to myself on the spot. Later, I took the image and used it as a template to work up a vector graphic representation of the logo idea. This was a much less complicated bit of work than the Flaming Dragons logo I recently did, but that's okay — these are 5- and 6-year-old kids.

Here's the final work:

The team's head coach seems to like it, at least if I'm correctly interpreting "DUUUUUDE!!! THAT ROCKS!!!!! I LOVE IT!!!!!". So I guess it's a "go". I really enjoy doing these simple little projects. The smiles on the kids faces easily justifies the minimal cost I put into creating the logos.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Subversion Chat at CollabNet Virtual Conference

Tomorrow, April 15, 2010, CollabNet is hosting its first ever virtual conference. Entitled "Agile ALM for Distributed Development", the fully virtual event is focused around the methodologies and products which make Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) possible and efficient, especially where geographically distributed teams need to collaborate seamlessly.

I'm hosting a "scheduled chat" on Subversion at 7:30am PDT. So, if you're available and online tomorrow around that time, and you'd to chat live with me about Subversion, then do the following:

  1. Register for the conference. (Now! Go do it!)
  2. Login at the appropriate time to the conference using the instructions you receive from the registration process.
  3. Once logged in, visit the "Communication Center".
  4. Click the "Scheduled Chats" item.
  5. Click the "Subversion for the Enterprise" chat item. (It will only become a live link at the time of the session.)

This is a free-form chat with no agenda, so come with your questions. See you there!

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Subversion Vision Conference in NYC

I'm in New York City for the Subversion Vision Conference. Follow my daily progress reports via the Submerged blog.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Flaming Dragons

Another season of youth soccer is upon us. Gavin's decided to take up piano this season, but Aidan is happy to have moved up to Harrisburg Parks and Recreation's 5/6 age bracket, the first in which the kids get to play actual soccer games.

The two guys I coached with last season on Gavin's team — Darryl Strack and Bobbie Middleton — have moved up with their kids to the 7/8 age bracket and are coaching together again. I ran into them last weekend, where I learned that their team had chosen the name "Flaming Dragons". I had a lot of fun with these guys last Fall with our Soccer Monsters team, including designing a team logo which we had made up into stickers and iron-on patches. So when Bobbie asked me last Saturday if I'd be willing to do the same for their new Flaming Dragons team, how could I pass that up? When eating lunch later day, I scratched out a rough idea in crayon (on the table top at Supper Restaurant) for the logo:

Then, I spent a few evening hours this week converting that simple drawing into a real vector artwork file:

Meanwhile, Aidan's team has chosen the name "Hot Lava". Not … really … sure what to do about that one just yet.