I was asked to record a five minute video about retrospectives, and below is the text I came up with! The official scrum guide says that “the sprint retrospective is an opportunity for the team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next sprint”. If you’re just starting out with running retrospectives though, beginning your retrospectives with this goal can quickly devolve to finger pointing and complaining.

It’s been five years since we’ve had a vacation without children, and I was completely thrilled to have it be Gen Con, in Indianapolis. The last time we went was in 2010, so it’s been awhile, and a lot has changed! It would probably be best to start from the beginning of the trip though. We decided to leave on Tuesday afternoon so that we could get a day to relax before the conference, which ended up being a pretty good decision.

Part of being a parent is being able to share the things that you find joy in doing, and this past week I got a chance to help my daughter discover the wonders of winter. On Thursday, we went skating with the Grad Cell small group, and she had a blast! She didn’t end up skating on her own at all, so we had to take turns holding her up as she walked around the ice.

I’ve been having an ongoing dispute with my wife about how cute our daughter is. She insists that I am asking biased questions when I try to get opinions on how she compares to other babies. Well, this past week, I went to make a reservation at a local Chinese restaurant that we frequent, and this is the conversation that ensued: Me: Hi, I’d like to make a reservation for six adults and one baby.

I was forced to take a mandatory course yesterday as part of my employment duties. I got about halfway through the course before I nearly broke down in frustration at the lack of basic grammar and editing in the questions and content. I was chatting with a co-worker while I was doing the course, and expressed my anger to her. She told me to “turn your internal grammar/spelling/logic sensor off”. Since there was no off switch for my sensor, I resorted to documenting the atrocities against the English language that I was witnessing as a way of dealing with the fact that I had to read these unedited words.