A great eye opener and a collection of tools that I was missing all these days! Yes, when you work in the IT industry you and specially in the management team you always ask yourself what is going wrong? why things are taking much longer than they were supposed? why I have ended up with an unsatisfied customer? why I feel people working on projects unhappy? why are they complaining all the time and not motivated? why did that bug just exploded in the face of the customer during the chairman demo? why and why? so many question that possibly I can answer some of them and still working to learn more to find the missing ones.

The answers start to come up early in 2006, when we started a new development strategy, throwing waterfall methodology behind our back and starting a new era with Agile methodologies and XP practices. Today I am not going to talk about XP and the Agile methodologies, Yes they are great but still did not provide me answers I was looking for. Lean Development did!

Lean Software Development is a set of principles that you can call tools aim to produce rapidly developing high quality software with the highest value in the fastest way possible for the customer.

According to Wikipedia, Lean Development could be summarized by seven principles that I am not going to detail today, I will just mention them until I finish reading the most two popular books “Lean Software Development Agile Toolkit” and “Implementing Lean Software Development Concept” by Mary Poppendieck & Tom Poppendieck.

1- Eliminate waste and this is the most important factor to deliver fast with high value.

2- Amplify Learning, which I believe XP and other Agile methodologies are taking care of it.

3- Decide as late as possible to gather as much information as possible helping you to take the right decision

4-Deliver as fast as possible, this is your competitive advantage, time to market has been always an issue in SW development, and don’t forget the million dollar early feedback you can get from the customer

5-Empower the team and respecting people. and guess what! it does not mean being polite and showing curtsy to others. this is totally different.

6- Building integrity in, which I have to read more about to understand

7- Optimize the whole, don’t ever say this is not my problem, it is their problem, we are all on the same boat, we are either paid at the end of each month or selling hotdogs in the park.

What a great Idea! Coush Surfing is people networking website, looks like facebook, the idea is simple for people who likes to meet others from other parts of this world, different cultures, languages and different points of view, all what you have to do is to create profile and fill in some information, and you will start to send and receive couch requests, you can set the level of help you can afford, you can accept people to come to your place to spend and night or two, or maybe less by offering them showing them around and having a cup of tea or coffee, and you can do the same when you visit a place where you don’t know anybody from there, you can browse for people living there and you ask them to help you as mush as they could and they at least can show you around ang give you some useful tips.

I created my profile only couple of days ago, then WoW, Simon from Jordan sent me an invitation for couch surfers gathering, they wanted to say hello to new members and have nice evening with couch surfers currently located in Amman, the gathering took place at Jaffra, a coffee shop downtown, my first impression was good, then everything went smooth and easy, we started to introduce to each other and talking about our experiences traveling, working and kicking in this life.

I met two nice guys from Spain, they were so cute and lovely, I am bad with names but they were so kind, they are CIVIL engineers doing a trip in Jordan for pleasure, I have tried to talk to the Iranian couple, but one of them was not good in English, the girl was also nice, at the end I met with the Italian couple, Barbara and Georgio, they have just arrived Jordan, they came directly from the Airport to the gathering, I am thankful for them, they were very helpful and they provided me so many useful tips to survive my trip to Rome in the next couple of week.

I was looking for something like CouchSurf for ages, I hope I can make more friends and enjoy helping people surviving Amman. I will consider this as part of my Job enhancing our picture (Arabs and Muslims) in the eyes of other people of the world, so help me God.

Here are some PICs from today gathering.

As part of my trip to Palestine during EID holiday early this month, my cousin took me to Bethlehem to have fun and spend a day discovering my home country Palestine.

The City VIBES, food and everything there were more than perfect.
First of all we went there at lunch time, so first thing was to have decent meal, in Beit Jala (The closet town to Bethlehem), there is a very popular place called KA’BAR (كعبر), this is a very nice, clean and YUM YUM place, it serves grilled chicken with Arabic appetizers I consider the best I have ever had.

After having a great meal, we went back to Bethlehem, to the downtown, it is not much different than Hebron (My Home), there are a lot of local stores scattered in the alleyways in the ancient city selling souvenirs and clothes.

Cities of Palestine (WEST BANK) are not so big in general, so going around the city was so quick and my cousin suggested directly to go to the Church (Church of the Nativity) the place were Jesus (Peace upon him) was born. There was a lot of people from different nationalities visiting the church, it was like a festival.

After spending 4 hours in the city, we hit the road back Home, full of hope that one day we will live in peace and love.

I was reading a nice post on Rob’s blog, it seems that they are thinking “in the US” to make it 3 days weekend instead of the usual 2 days, for no reason I went crazy and started to laugh loud, I remember a comic sent by one of colleagues couple of months ago, it is really enough to express what I want to say.

I couldn’t find any English words that can express what I feel right now, it is was a hell of day, we are not used to high temperature like this, I will go postal if this hot weather went for another two days. In the gulf every single room is air conditioned but here I don’t think so, Thanx god I bought 1 ton Air Conditioner last year, it worths every “kirsh” I paid for, I can’t even leave my room wallah.

For the second time in this life, I attended Zade’s concert that took place in Amman on the 19th June 2008, the concert was great, Zade was shining as usual and the audience were incredible, the concert took place at the Roman Theater, downtown of Amman, the concert started at 08:30 which was supposed to start 07:30, stairs were full of audience, I believe people were not allowed to attend because of no space.

Zade was great and shining as usual and as I like to call the guy “Yanni of Jordan” let me feel so prude of him being Jordanian, the London orchestra joined Zaid during his performance, Janna from Lebanon also preformed a marvelous song for Ziad Rahabani of Lebanon, her voice made that warm evening of Amman unforgettable, I wounder where I can find a CD for her?

I will not say much about Zaid, I really stand speechless in front of his simplicity and kindness and maybe this describes the huge number of people were there! Keep up the good Job Zaid, someday we will meet and talk and I will express how much I like what you are doing.

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Yes that is right, no more DVD by one JD. Today I went downtown to pick up the mail from the post office in Prince Mohammad Street, on this weekly job I pass by the plenty DVD stores scattered in the area and pick 6 DVDs by 5 JDs which is a kind of promotion (Buy 5 get 1 free), today it was different, I bought my 6 DVDs but this time seems to be the last time, all stores in the street were closed (Sealed by the Government), Mousa, the Giant and many more were closed!!!! There are two or three places left, I have not bought from those guys before but I had to, after 10 mins spent to decide which DVDs I will pick, I asked the owner, what happened to the other places? He said, they were sealed by the government, no more illegal DVDs are allowed to be sold. I asked what about you? Do you have wasta? He said no, they will seal my place as soon as my license expires in one month. So what will happen to all these DVDs you have and those inside the other places? He said, they all will be destroyed!! offffff! So what is the problem, I asked. He said the government decided to stop allowing us to sell illegal copies.

At the end, I paid the 5 JDs, drew a silly smile on my silly face and went home thinking what a big loss?

First of all, I would like to apologize not being able to write this post couple of hours ago, it was supposed to be on 15th actually it is now the 16th May 01:15 AM in the morning .

I am standing today speechless, thoughtless and really not able to write down the thousand ideas in my mind.

I am Jordanian from Palestine origin, Jordan and Palestine are one thing for me “my home”, I love them both and I wish I could work for them both, I am doing my best these days.

Thanx god I have the chance to go to visit Palestine whenever I like, actually I have the necessary papers to move freely between Jordan and Palestine “Freely depends here in the Israeli side”.

I used to visit my relatives in Hebron every year, but now it has been three years since I was there last time, busy working….

When I was there in 2005, I saw the most annoying ugly thing a human being can see in his life, it is the “WALL”, I was in a cap on my way to Hebron (my original Hometown) the sun was shinning and every thing was good so far, as you might know as Palestinians we can not enter the 48th territories, Jerusalem is considered an Israel’s’ land and the army wont allow me “a Palestinian Identity Card holder” to pass through Jerusalem which is supposed to be the city where my father and grand father passed all their lives. so the cap driver went through a very long route which passes through “Abu Deas” a suburb near Jerusalem and suddenly and in a very odd way the sun was blocked the street was narrowed and it was there, the “WALL”, you just don’t want to feel how bad and ugly it was “Actually it is as it still remains there”, I have every felt like a slave in my whole life but there it was something else, the Wall was cutting the town into two pieces you can see buildings separated by the wall, those buildings where supposed to be one minute far away from each other, but now you can say it will take more than an hour in a car to pass from one to the other, imagine your brother or family living just in the next block and it takes more than an hour to reach them, and you have to pass through so many check points as we were traveling from one country to another.

“Someday that wall will break down, and we’ll live in piece”

Yesterday I was telling a colleague that I miss being there, it has been so long and I just want to be there!

When I watch the news and I see all those problems between Hamas and Fateh, I wonder how much silly they are, can’t they see that Israel wants us to be separated, can’t you see that they want us to get busy beating each other, can’t you see how many things they are doing behind the scene while we are fighting! It is enough! Our brothers and sister are being killed every day, shouldn’t we respect their blood? Please give me a break, let’s work for Palestine and forget ourselves for a while.

I want the piece process to move forward, and I don’t want to say that we should throw all the Jews in the sea as it is said, I am realistic and I can tell what is possible and what is not, actually our problem is not with Jews or the Jewish religion itself, in Islam we shall respect all religions and we must respect Mousa and Ibrahim “3alehm el Salam”. Our problem is with the Zionist movement and making Palestine a country for the Jews, this is something not clear for the youngest generations as I feel.

Listen! Gaza is under siege and our brothers and sisters there are facing the face of death every day, they don’t have gas they almost ran out of medicine food and so many other basic things, let’s think how much money we spend every day on things we don’t use or we just buy them for no reason, how much money we spend on Cafe shops and clubs, we spend a lot, let’s try to present something for our brothers and sisters there through the possible channels, do you think 25 JDs a month is a great amount of money, why don’t each one of us pay 25 JDs a month to help a child in Gaza or the West Bank “Kafalet Yatem”.

I have one other thing to say before I go to sleep tonight, I am working to enhance myself and my skills, I am trying to educate myself and to become a better person so someday whenever I have the chance I can serve my home, Jordan and Palestine.