Jana started an interesting thread on a Telligent-internal mailing list, which prompted Josh to follow up with a great blog post. The topic was four questions:
1. What was your favorite work-related or field related or technical read for 2009 (white paper, book, etc)
2. What was your favorite new Telligent feature for 2009?
3. What was your favorite enhancement for Telligent products in 2009?
4. Favorite external app/product/feature you used in 2009?
I enjoyed a bit of a retrospective over the year and came up with the following responses.
Favorite work- or field-related or technical read: Leading Lean Software Development by Tom & Mary Poppendieck. Awesome motivator for what organizations can do if they get the entire group solidly behind transforming how they build, deliver, and support/service products and services. Bob Martin’s Clean Code would be a close second, Stand Back and Deliver a solid third.
Favorite Telligent feature for 2009: I was lucky enough to work with a great group of guys (Dave, Nate, Sean) on v2 of Telligent’s web services API. They kicked ass with amazing work and evolved our web services into a solid, powerful approach for extending and writing new apps on our Telligent Evolution platform.
Favorite enhancement for Telligent products in 2009: If you’ve read my blog or Tweets much then you know I’m a Lean fanatic. My favorite enhancements for our products in 2009 are those we didn’t. Nope, that’s not a typo. Our leadership gave us some great support for rethinking how we approached development in the last four to six months. As a result, we focused hard on a lot of things behind the scenes. Features were dropped from the backlog. Features were simplified in our current codebase. Features were CUT from our codebase. As a result, we’ve ended up with an improved codebase and significantly simplified user experience. Cutting and simplifying is an absolutely glorious feeling. Lean, FTW!
Favorite external app/product/feature of 2009: Visual Studio, because while I’m not a “real” developer, writing code is a great way for me to stay engaged with things I’m very passionate about. (Testing, development practices, beautiful code.)
