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.

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