This is not a RAGBRAI Post! - Intertech 25th Anniversary

Last week (Wednesday, August 3) I attended Intertech's 25th Anniversary   Peculiarly, two of my coworkers were there as were their wives.  The Twin Cities tech industry is mighty small.  I asked Sanjay if one of the two women at the end of the row in the rather short skirts was his wife and he laughed because his wife told him about the two women I was asking about.  In my defense, they looked like interns (young), so I was wondering exactly how young Sanjay's wife was.

Presentations included Jim Karg on IoT.  Lonnie Weaver-Johnson on Organization Benefits from Agile and Scrum Adoption.  And Tom Salonek, who runs Intertech, on Delivering High Performance Using Employee Engagement.  There was a little bit of good information in each presentation, although they were at a higher level then I tend to like.


Jim referred to the Gartner 2015 Hype Cycle, which I always forget exists.  It worries me that hybrid cloud computing and machine learning are over the hump given thsoe are spaces I'm working in lately.  Those others things - I'm not even close to worrying about them.

It was a good presentation on battery tracking in golf carts.  I wasn't quite sure how you get enough golf carts under IoT to make it worthwhile, but perhaps golf cart purchasing/selling or storage is more centralized than I understand.

Weaver-Johnson was pretty basic Agile/Scrum.  We've been Agile-ish for going on 3+ years with Hussman's help, so it's old hat, even if we're constantly refining our process.  Amusingly, I had a group that went back to our old testing-signs-off-on-stories process despite quality having had a more free reign on one of my teams.  All stories, even 0 points/days get a quality review/signoff and estimate.  Maybe that's more agile.  It's hard to say.  But I know the team likes it and is more efficient using the process and they talk more, so those better communication chains are what really matter.

Weaver-Johnson referred to the Cuckoo Effect.  It's a variation on our culture training where we're taught to look for how to make something work, not what's wrong with the idea.  I don't think it's a good metaphor - because when cuckoos invade your nest, there's a positive side, baby cuckoo birds.
https://chrismurman.com/2014/11/11/blog-post-dont-let-the-cuckoo-effect-ruin-your-organization/

I liked Salonek's presentation best.  He has a new book, The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership.

I haven't read it yet because I'm knee deep in: Analytics, a Foundation Novel I started on RAGBRAI, a Saunders book I took to RAGBRAI but haven't finished, the end of Disrupted, and Elastic, Angular2, Python, D3, AWS, Eureka, and Spinnaker documentation.  And a little bit of ANTLR and other nonsense.  It's queued up.  I'll get there very soon.

He talked quite a bit about culture fit for new hires.  Intertech does a lot of screening and looks at Key Result Areas (very specific goals) and TTI Success Insights (DISC based - you know my opinion on  those sorts of things - they're talking tools, not science), Tom noted that as far as pay was concerned, aim for slightly above market and make sure pay isn't an issue.  That's exactly what Dan Pink says in Drive.  It's all the more compelling given I just had another employee leave to do contracting.

Enjoyable.  I'm glad I stayed for the presentations and free beer and I won 4-5 days of training at Intertech while I was there which I'm jazzed about.  I can't decide if I'm more interested in Angular 2 or .NET Core.  I think .NET core, although the description still says there's a focus on MVC which bores me to tears.  Well...not quite tears.  But I don't want to learn more MVC.

RAGBRAI - Day 5 - Centerville to Ottumwa - 57.6 miles, 1999 feet of climb)

ADDENDUM: I can't believe I forgot to add this, but Adam reminded me I left out one of the best parts of RAGBRAI Day 5.  While we were at the Ottumwa bridge, a nice couple on a golf cart offered to give the three of us a ride back to the camp site.  We piled onto the suicide seat and....the golf cart just sat there, the front wheels almost lifting off the ground.  With dozens of people watching, the cart slowly moved forward about a foot.  Then another.  Then just wouldn't do it anymore, much to the amusement of a few who shouted encouragement and advice.  That's what precipitated our long walk back past the McDonalds.

Day 5, Centerville to Ottumwa.  Other than the last day, this may have been our fastest day of cycling.  We flew through the route and ended up getting to the campground in Ottumwa ahead of the truck.  We spent a lot of time just hanging out where we intended to camp and talking to Tun about his $8000+ loaner bike.

Here's Ming using the porta potty in Rathbun.  These seems obviously to be color coded for men and women.  Sexist porta porties.  Ming defied color convention and used the pink one as Adam was already occupying blue.  A following day one of the stops had multi-colored porta potties - much more PC.


This is the Rathbun Dam on Rathbun Lake.  Beautiful.  But I couldn't get cyclists not to pedal in front of me and stop to take photos as they didn't want someone in their photo taking a picture.  Sort of dickish behavior. I was tempted to just wander ahead of this guy, but then I decided if I ever need a better picture I can just crop him out.  A beautiful place to catch the sunrise.  Reminded me a bit of the really long bridge Adam and I crossed during the 2013 RAGBRAI.


We stopped in Moravia for breakfast.  It was a nice little town.


Ming and I were excited to have something different for breakfast and the biscuits and gravy at the church with fruit was delicious.  Adam wasn't having it - he went for lighter fare.


My geotags aren't doing this service because this probably wasn't Troy, IA. I think it was Unionville.  This is the pie spread that greeted us.  One of the ladies had made something like 113 or 130 pies leading up to RAGBRAI in the last 24 hours.  $2 for pie.  $1 for ice cream.  Endless coffee was free.  An amazing set up - fruit pies, cream pies...I wish I hadn't eaten that heavy breakfast and could have done seconds.  Ming later opined that he should have just eaten half of two slices instead of a whole slice.


Look at it.  It is beautiful. That's the RAGBRAI pie experience you hope to find.


The campgrounds in Ottuma were excellent.  Huge park with old trees near a loop in the river.  Cool.  Quiet (comparatively).  Shady.  So nice compared to the open hot fields we usually inhabited.  After our tents were set up and we found a shower truck, we told Tun we'd meet him at the local BBQ place.  He biked over there - we chose to use the shuttle.  In retrospect, waiting 30-some minutes (or more) for the shuttle to go about a mile wasn't the best plan.  By the time we got to the BBQ joint, Tun had eaten his food.  But he stayed to chat while we ate.  And if we hadn't taken the shuttle Ming wouldn't have struck up his friendship with the Hyvee lady and we wouldn't have seen the guy who sat down at the shuttle stop in his bibs with a whole large pizza, and folded two slices in half like a sandwich and ate them, rinse and repeat, until he had one piece left he gave away.  That was a big appetite.

After BBQ we headed over to the local theater.  Ming and Adam went to the Star Trek flick I'd already seen, so I went to Lights Out, which was boring (and reminded me of a story in my George Saunder's book, just longer and with less capable acting). Lot of cyclists came in to use the A/C.  One guy came in speaking another language and the teenage ticket guy started talking to him in an Eastern language.  Apparently the guy was Polish and the ticket taker knew Russian and Ukrainian.  They talked, remarked how stupid each other sounded in their own language selection, and then got down to figuring out for the price of a ticket how the Polish guy could optimize his movie-watching experience so he didn't have to leave the theater for the next six hours.  Some very good natured theater staff.


This was a bigger town, so they had bigger entertainment.  On their bridge, Rick Springfield performed later.  We didn't catch that, but we wandered around, shopped for t-shirts for kids (found Eryn a tie dye one to replace the Elroy Sparta one she had as a little kid), found some food, and watch the entertainment prior to Rick.


The number of people downtown was fairly sparse, but if you got over to the bridge it was pretty solidly packed.


The pre-Springfield show was a bunch of folks dressed up like famous entertainers (Adam had to point out to me that the woman in the skirt was Katy Perry).  We watched them and all the "dancers" (quotes intended for irony) on a big screen right near where they were playing.  I think we could have turned around to see them if the food vendors hadn't been behind us.  At one point one of the guys sitting near us said (paraphrase), "Is it just me, or have they been playing the same song for the last 20 minutes?"  I don't think he was wrong - they were sort of jamming and dancing for a long time at one point.


We took the long path back when we got routed around the river and stopped at a McDonald's for a cone and fries.  They were out of cones, so I settled for more soda than any human should drink just to rehydrate.  A lady on RAGBRAI stopped at our table and asked why we were eating at McDonald's given all the RAGBRAI options.  She was there for a cone as well, so our goals were similar.  We told her we generally hit the churches and stands or local places.  We saw her again a day or two later and noted we were eating local.  There were a lot of people we saw multiple times - Dan K from Minneapolis who pulled a trailer behind him every morning, the McDonald's Lady, the aeroshell bike guy, MBA Trek woman, Ms. San Antonio, Ms Panties (Adam's nickname), the not-dressed-as-much-as-other-riders-and-very-tan pair (of women), some of the Cuisine riders, Tun (almost every day - he finished near the front of the pack)...sort of like being in a new town for a week.