Sam Parnell

How many social network profiles can you have?

2007-08-15T19:46:00.001-07:00

It seems that every ten minutes a new social network pops up. I don't have profiles on that many sites but it seems that more and more any site I register on gives me a public profile.

I thought I'd start keeping track of them as they proliferate.

Me on Facebook

Sam Parnell on Linked In

My Plaxo Profile

Working with Rails

Reached Level 70....finally....

2007-08-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

I've finally reached level 70 in WOW. It's only taken about 2 years! Probably on of the slowest progressions to max level ever. Just there in time for the announcement of the new expansion pack.

Here's the proof on the armory. I really did get there :-)

Learn't a new word today

2007-06-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

What is "Ecotourism"? Having spent some time recently working on travel sites I was interested to hear this term. There seems to be a growing number of travel sites popping up claiming to be eco-friendly tour operators.
Wikipedia, as always, has a great page describing the space with a good review of the good and bad being done by the industry.

Core·Continuum launches new Rails site for Outsell Inc.

2007-03-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

A long over due post. Last year we launched a new rails based site for Outsell Inc.

This was our first big rails launch since we started Core·Continuum.

"Core·Continuum partners with Outsell to revitalize web presence, delivering segmented customer information, end-to-end commerce and online document distribution for the information industry pioneer -- October 2006."

Core·Continuum moves to new location

2007-03-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

We just moved to a our new location. Finally we have our own space to grow into.

Find us at 589 Howard, SF

Pandora Rocks

2005-12-01T16:55:00.000-08:00

pandora.com provides a very cool music recommendation engine.

The RIA app provides a slick UI. It's a Flash based UI that is built using the OpenLaszlo framework. This post from Tom Conrad notes their involvement.

The recommendations are based on the MusicGenomeProject
that has been ongoing since 2000.

Shamless Plug

2005-10-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

Blast Radius annouced the new Redwood Shores office. Subbu, Demo, Dave and myself all came back together this summer to help build out the California region.

Agile Planning

2005-10-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

This is a nice concise post on the benefits of agile planning from Martin Fowler:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FivePoundBag.html

It's somewhat of an art form getting it right. I've always liked the analogy of a bucket for each iteration. You want to make sure the bucket is full for each iteration (ie, don't have too few stories)
to maximise the team's velocity. It's always possible to overfill the bucket a little before stories start falling out but putting too much in can burn out the team, reduce the quality and cut corners on functionality.

Martin mentions estimation and tracking as a key inputs. I've found that getting developers to estimate at the task level rather than a story gives more focus and more acturate estimates. Getting the developers to track the time spent on each task on a card or board where they can also see their estimate also helps. Too often we don't close the feedback loops with estimation to see how the estiamtes compare too the actuals. This exercise improves the quality of the estimation.

First Post

2005-10-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

It's about time I finally got round to creating a blog. The blogger tool seems popular with a few folks I know so let's give it a try.