Most of you know that I’m a Boy Scout leader. Part of my current job is to teach young scouts about citizenship as a merit badge counselor for Citizenship in the Community/Nation/World. These are three eagle-required badges that are frankly, in my opinion, the best and most important badges scouts earn. Here’s requirement #1 for…
It’s amazing how clarifying a prototype can be! While I had a general idea of what I wanted to automate for my brewery v3, I didn’t have a clear idea of how to exactly put it together until I got all of the pieces on my dining room table and started to solder and drill….
The Sweeney Brewery v3 has lots of electrical controls. I have six 2-way electric ball valves – three for tun control and three for gas control, and two 3-way valves for various fluid routing processes. I also have a new Omega CN7500 (more on that later), and the system pump. Controlling everything, I have an…
Almost 21 years ago, my oldest daughter, Kathryn was born. The night before she was born, I brewed my first batch of beer. It was an American Pale Ale extract recipe that I cooked up on the stove. That batch was to kickoff a lifelong hobby that has taken me through many engineering adventures leading…
I recently read The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz. In this brilliant read, the author asserts that not only is business value an ill-defined term in the Agile literature, even if we could define it clearly, how do we estimate it? For example, one of the Agile PM mantras states that the backlog…
A colleague of mine, who is another division-level IT manager, and I are teaching a course in the fall. The course is a senior level elective that focuses on special topics in technology management. Cool – right up our alley. We were given freedom to pick the topic, and of course we chose DevOps. You…
“I will never vote for Donald Trump.” That’s a direct quote from your’s truly in February of this year. But as a middle-aged white guy, I also remember the Clinton years. For those of you from that vintage, you remember; Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Healthcare version one, impeachment, Vince Foster – you get the picture. I’m…
My mother, Doris Mae Staton Sweeney, passed way early in the morning on Saturday, May 21st, 2016. She died in her sleep after having a nice dinner with her husband and friends at a local restaurant. She had been working in the garden on Friday pulling weeds. Her Easter lilies had started to bloom and…
The speed of change in IT is dizzying. Exciting, but dizzying. Sometimes it feels that we move so fast, we can’t even get introduced to a new process or service before it changes. Other IT shops seem to be feeling the pressure as well. Here’s an example: an article titled Are 18-month org charts and constant…