Paradise in The Philippines

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Sagada is as different from the rest of the Philippines as Darjeeling is to the rest of India. It’s an oasis of beauty with a slower pace. After an 18 hour journey to get from Manila to Sagada, I arrived at my guest house and was invited for coffee and cake by some educators, they were in the region for a conference on curriculum for indigenous children. They were going caving that afternoon and invited me to join them. I jumped at the chance and got changed.

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On The Road in Manila

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Prior to World War II, Manila was known as the “Pearl of the Orient,” now it is just an over crowded asian city with as much smog as Beijing and the smell of Calcutta. I did not find much about Manila to make me like it. It’s worth maybe a day or two at most perhaps a few days longer if you use it as a base for day trips. I’ve ruled it out as a place I might want to live in. I did encounter the best scam I’ve ever come across there, perhaps I’ll write about that later.

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The Science Behind Scrum

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Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross functional and are self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, 4 weeks or less. By the end of a sprint the code must be functional, tested and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control, which is based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. A defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact.
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