The Misappropriation of Terms: Andon Cord

Software developers tend to be a bit hipsterish in that we seem to have an inherent attraction to novel things - especially when those novel things are lifted from the old things of other disciplines. The Andon Cord is one of those nuggets lifted from the same corpus that brought us much of what is now termed “agile”: Automobile manufacturing - specifically, the manufacturing practices of Toyota. While more thoroughly described by others, the Andon Cord was a physical cord that ran along side Toyota’s entire production line and when pulled, stopped the assembly line.

Posted by Howard Friday, October 28, 2016

9 Months In - Reflections on Teams and Agile

I’ve been a dev manager now for about 9 months and I have to say that I’m really enjoying this role. It’s not a job without frustrations, and I haven’t escaped the all of the frustrations that I had as a PM - particularly that of trying to balance writing code with “other duties as assigned.” However, when it’s all summed, I think that I’m a much better fit for operating on the engineering side of the house than I am at the business side.

Posted by Howard Monday, May 18, 2015

SEARCH
FEATURED TAGS
api-versioning apis architecture career devops home-office javascript linked-data management microservices personal rdf reading research rest swagger time-management workflow
ABOUT ME
avatar

I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.