Queen’s Round – download audio file

Agile Product Management in Practice

I will try to update this sadly neglected blog with a summary of said talk sometime soon.

The basics

If you can do these three things, you can get useful results for most searches on common topics:

1. Read really fast. I don’t know if this is the same as speed reading or not, but the ability to skim rapidly for keywords is critical to being able to sort out what you’re looking for from the masses of link spam. If you don’t know how to speed read, check out lifehacker.com or similar for tips.

2. Start with the phrases you would expect someone to use. Whatever question you have, chances are someone else has already asked it on a bulletin board somewhere  Actually type in a whole phrase instead of just a couple of keywords – often this is all you need to do. For example “how to create a site map” will get you much better results than “site map”

3. It’s a big internet, be specific. Start specific and then broaden your terms if you don’t get the results you’re looking for. For example if you’re looking for the best way to generate a site map for a large site “best approach to site map creation for a large site” is the place to start. If the first 5 results don’t contain anything useful, then try “best approach to site map creation.”

Just following the tips above should get you something within the first page of results. If that doesn’t work, move on to the next section.

When that doesn’t work

Sometimes I’m googling for stuff that’s a little more obscure or non-technical (my hobby is costuming, especially historical costuming).

4. Don’t stop at the first page of results If there are sponsored results at the top of the page, that often correlates to the first page is full of search engine optimized pages. Most of what I’m looking for is *not* from folks that spend a lot of time on SEO. Before giving up on a particular search, I usually scan all the results on the first and second page and then click to a page further into the results (10th or thereabouts). If there’s nothing close to what I’m looking for then it’s time to move on to the next step.

5. Find synonyms. Maybe you’re searching for the wrong words.  Click on the most likely results you can find in the first couple of pages. Focus on things that look like bulletin boards or discussion forums. Sponsored results also come in handy here; people who are selling you something will be trying to use clear language. Skim those pages looking for synonyms. Now repeat steps 1-3 using your new search terms.

If all else fails

6. Try a different type of search. If you can’t get what you want from a standard google search, take the same thing to image search. People’s captions and diagrams are often quite relevant. Click through the likeliest looking images and scan the resulting pages… If that doesn’t work, try an abbreviated form of your search on twitter. Then repeat step 5. Until it works

Happy searching!

Note: This was supposed to be an easy post – take something I’m good at, break it into steps, voila. But when I started dissecting what I do it’s actually more complex than it feels…  posting it anyway in case it’s helpful to others.

Idea courtesy of Fi’s decision *not* to be a ninja for halloween after all.

Preconditions:

• User has access to ingredients consisting of:
  • 9″ pie shell/crust (trader joe’s makes a good one)
  • about a dozen apples (you can use Granny Smith if you can’t get Gravenstein, but then you need more sugar)
  • sugar
  • cinnamon
  • nutmeg
  • vanilla
  • salt
  • 1 large lemon
  • 1 stick of butter
  • flour
• User has access to typically equipped United States kitchen including oven, cookie sheet, spatula, aluminum foil, pastry cutter and medium mixing bowl
• Oven is preheated to 400°

Success Case: Pie.

1. User sets the frozen pie shell out to defrost.
2. User peels the apples and slices them up thinly into bowl.
3. User drizzles a small amount of lemon juice as each apple is sliced into bowl.
   1. Acid in lemon juice destroys enzymes preventing phenols and enzymes in apples from reacting – apples brown more slowly
4. User repeats steps 2-3 until bowl is approximately 2/3 full or contents will overfill pie shell.
5. User sprinkles cinnamon and nutmeg on to apples in bowl.
6. User adds up to 1 teaspoon of vanilla
7. User adds up to 1 cup of sugar
8. User stirs contents of bowl with spatula
   1. Apples are coated with sugar/spice mixture and a syrup develops in bottom of bowl.
   2. An odor of cinnamon and vanilla permeates the area immediately surrounding the bowl.
9. User dumps contents of bowl into defrosted pie shell, mounding in middle.
10. User washes and dries bowl.
11. User adds 1 stick butter 2/3 cup flour, 2/3 cup sugar and 1/2 tsp of baking soda to bowl.
12. User repeatedly mashes butter into dry ingredients with pastry cutter
    1. Mixture takes on appearance of coarse crumbs
13. User pats handful of crumble topping onto apple mixture in pie shell. (repeat until bowl is empty)
14. User places pie shell on cookie sheet.
15. User places cookie sheet (with pie shell containing apple mixture covered in crumble topping) in oven and sets timer for 15 minutes
    1. Pie cooks, high temperature browns bottom crust
    2. Timer sounds
16. User protects edge of crust with strips of aluminum foil
17. User reduces oven temperature to  350º
    1. Filling cooks  slowly, bubbling up through crumble topping onto cookie sheet.
    2. Fructose and Sucrose oxidize resulting in caramelization
    3. Kitchen smells really good
    4. Timer sounds
18. User removes cookie sheet with pie from oven.
19. User turns off oven.
20. User sets timer for 1 hour.
    1. Pie cools.
    2. Pectin from apples gels.

OUTCOME: Delicious apple pie!

Variations

Error Case a: Pie shell not defrosted

Proceeds as in success case with the following variations:

10_a. User curses under breath, then washes and dries bowl.

Steps 11-14  unchanged.

15_a. User goes and finds something else to do for an hour, then places cookie sheet in oven.

Steps 16-20  unchanged.

Error Case b: Bowl not sufficiently dry.

Unrecoverable error. If user does not dry bowl, crumble topping will be tough and chewy, consider adding bowl dryness detection requirement.

Error Case c: Overworked Crumble-topping

Unrecoverable error. If step 12 is repeated too frequently, crumble topping will be tough and chewy, add visual inspection of consistency after each repetition?

Error Case d: Cookie sheet omitted

Proceeds as in success case with the following variations:

Step 14 omitted

15_d. User places pie shell containing apple mixture covered in crumble topping in oven and sets timer for 15 minutes

Pie cooks, high temperature browns bottom crust Timer sounds

17_d. User reduces oven temperature to  350º

1. Filling cooks  slowly, bubbling up through crumble topping onto oven heating element
2. Kitchen fills with smoke
3. Timer sounds

Proceed as in success case steps 18-20, only with more cursing.

Deferred Use Case: Eat Pie.

It’s taken three tries because I suffer from the knowledge that, in this day and age, anything I might choose to say has already been said, and you, gentle reader, can google it. Nevertheless, I will proceed, daunted but unbowed. Here’s what I want to write about this week:

• The RoR Outreach Workshop for women, where I met the aforementioned Sarah (and the other Sarah)
• The transition our team made from Scrum to Kanban over the past 2 months
• How I search… because I do it better than you. (Well, maybe not *you* if you found this blog. But better than most people.)
• My apple pie recipe.

That seems doable. We shall see, tomorrow.