In my first post I talked about using this blog to explore modern software development and delivery practices. There is an awful lot to cover, and I only have vague plans, which are definitely subject to change. When I am organizing my thoughts for future blog posts I am really organizing tasks that need to be completed by my fictional software company ALSL. As this is very speculative in nature and difficult to time-box, and because I am doing this on my own, I am going to use a Kanban board to organize these tasks.

I already use a Kanban board to organize my tasks, and that is hosted by KanbanTool. I like that a lot and I have configured everything the way I like. It uses two swimlanes - one for work tasks that are not part of the project I work on (those tasks are in Rally), and one for personal to-dos. The columns I use are pretty standard, but I have divided today's tasks into four using the Eisenhower method, which helps me prioritize my day. That isn't necessarily going to be helpful for the tasks I carry out for the ALSL project, and KanbanTool doesn't allow publicly viewable boards.

For that reason I am going to try using Trello. I looked at it previously and I saw that it didn't do everything that KanbanTool did but that it was more flexible since it isn't really just a Kanban tool at all. Anecdotally, it is used fairly heavily by agile software projects, which is what ALSL really is, and its popularity means that it is easy to find information about integrating it with other software development tools such as source control and continuous integration tools. If Trello doesn't work out I might consider Pivotal Tracker, though that seems like it might be overkill for now.

Anyway, the ALSL Kanban board is up and I will create a link of the main page shortly. The first task I created is to improve the blog. I created it by following this article by Jonathan McGlone, but there is a lot left to do. I might not get it all done at once, but I definitely need to look at some things mentioned at the end of that article such as commenting and analytics, and I also need to sort out some basic styling based on HTML5 Boilerplate or Bootstrap. Another thing I need to do immediately is figure out what workflow I am going to use as far as drafting posts before I publish them. For drafts I am thinking of something along these lines - Public drafts in Jekyll.

I may or may not blog in much detail about the changes I make to the blog, but the next task that AI need to get done for ALSL is creating a development environment for me to use.