Michael C Hogan

Agile Product Development & Innovation Strategy

Mar
18

By

Vaccination is safe. About as safe as sending a child to school in the United States.

Category: Society

This week, the anti-vaxer movement hit home as I found myself in a conversation with someone who is against vaccines. I did some research so that I could respond to this anti-vaxer’s false claims and hyperbole. In the end, it turns out that getting a child vaccinated is no more risky to that child’s health than being sent to school in the United States. In the state of California, no one is forced to get a vaccine against his or her will, so please choose to vaccinate.

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Feb
9

By

So you want to start a website?

Category: Doing

Five steps that begin with selecting a strong password.

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Sep
19

By

IE/OR + programming = ?

Category: Engineering

Recently, on LinkedIn the following question was asked: “IE/OR + programming = ?” My answer: There are at least a few ways to solve this equation. In this post I take a look at three of them: UX Design, infrastructure automation, and Industrial Engineering tool design.

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Sep
19

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Can IT be leaner?

Category: Engineering

Recently, on LinkedIn the following question was asked: “Can IT be leaner?” My answer: Absolutely! In this post I take a look at how Lean (and Agile) concepts are being applied to IT tools and processes.

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Sep
2

By

Scaling Agile Development Methods

Category: Implementing

In July I was proud to be invited to speak at Agile Conference Europe. Here is a video of the talk I gave on the key differences between Scrum and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and how the practices SAFe advocates address many of the challenges inherent in scaling a change effort.

I’ve included a written version of my talk below.

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Jul
22

By

Sorting out sorting

Category: Engineering

Nine sorting algorithms are explained and compared with animation in this 30-minute YouTube video that’s a year older than I am, but still seems to be current. “Sorting Out Sorting” — Baecker, Ronald M., with the assistance of David Sherman, 30 minute color sound film, Dynamic Graphics Project, University of Toronto, 1981.

Sorting-Algorithms.com is another reference that offers visual comparisons between algorithms, along with links to more detailed information about each one.

After watching these videos, I stumbled upon some sorting algorithms implemented in JavaScript available on GitHub: nzakas/computer-science-in-javascript.

Aug
24

By

Five ways Friends of Inharrime can improve their nonprofit website #SkillsForChange

Category: Design Tags:

Friends of Inharrime, a nonprofit supporting youth education and nutrition in Mozambique, asked the Skills for Change community for five ways to improve their website design.

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Apr
29

By

Sequoia Time: a tool for solving sequoia-scale problems

Category: Philosophy Tags:

In an experiment, I posted a brief reflection on Sequoia Time on hitRECord. Here it is…

Towering nearly one-hundred feet above me, and below an additional two-hundred feet of living wood, grew a single branch larger in diameter than any tree east of the Mississippi River. Even more impressive, the branch’s bearer had seen the surrounding wood arise over a period spanning three millennia. Standing in the shadow of such a giant, I experienced the sequoia as a connective tissue, transcending the traditional boundaries of the human life span and time measured on a human scale.

I imagined time as it might appear from a sequoia’s perspective, a frame of reference I refer to as sequoia time.

Hypothesis: Many of the recurring problems faced by humanity (wars, segregation, bigotry and others) arise due to a combination of the human tendency to accept a given truth only once having experienced it firsthand and a lack of accessible recorded information about the missteps of our ancestors. To overcome these sequoia-scale issues, we must think in sequoia time.

If you have comments, please share them on Twitter — @mch82 #SequoiaTime. For more on Sequoia Time, check out my original essay on Sequoia Time from 2001. It’s a little wordy and academic, but I still think it’s worth a look.

Apr
12

By

Redirecting web addresses with .htaccess

Category: Doing, Engineering Tags: ,

Here is a tutorial that worked for me:

htaccess 301 redirect tutorial

And here is the key part that I missed on my first couple tries:

Scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

It’s as easy as that. Save the file, upload it back into your web and test it out by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.

Notes: Be sure not to add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – just put the path from the top level of your site to the page.

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