Scrum, being one of the most well-known lightweight agile process frameworks, is used a lot nowadays. But are we using it right? One might argue that an adaptable framework suggests no „wrong” uses – you’d simply tune it so that it suits your needs just perfectly. Although that might be the case in theory, but looking at how real-world Scrum projects cope with different situations, one might come to a conclusion that it isn’t as straightforward as it seems...

On 18-19 of May in the heart of London “Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit” took place. Most probably, you’ve heard about Gartner in relation to their famous Magic Quadrants that emphasize leaders in selected categories. Nevertheless, they do a lot of other interesting stuff including various events organization.

Redis is described by its author Salvatore Sanfilippo as a “strange project”. It’s a distributed cache, it’s an in-memory key-value store, and it’s a notification (publish/subscribe) server. A kind of all-in-one, which is actually good at everything it does. Although Redis keys and values are essentially just strings, one can group them into lists, sets, hashes and all-powerful sorted sets. It also stores numbers very efficiently, which makes such values consume less memory and enables fast numerical operations on them (like atomic increments).

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let’s be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let’s gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way – e.g., quick decision making.

The last few months I’ve spent on an interesting Data Mining project. The aim of this data science exercise was to help business reduce customer handling time in a contact center. The project itself and the results we’ve achieved will be covered in my next article, but today I would like to share how I solved a technical issue that came up during the project.