As a software architect, David Walker looks for the "story" behind the software: what do the users need, how will they interact with technology and what will it help them accomplish. After being highly productive at work, David looks for ways to enhance productivity outside of work by taking the lessons learned from software development and applying them to everyday problems.

You can panic or you can take ownership of the situation. When Alan White discovered he had cancer, this was the decision he had to make. With his new perspective on life, Alan lives to enjoy the journey. For him, things have become easy. Laid off from his job? No problem, there will be another one. Diagnosed with a second form of cancer? Alan just laughs.

ScrumBrawl is a competitive board game designed for 2-4 players where fantastic creatures vie for supremacy within a 20x20 battle arena. Tim Bugher, one-half of VicTim Games, shares the origin story of the game (conceived as a space battle card game) as well as his reasons for getting unplugged on this episode.

In middle school, Leon Fowler opened his first business: a bubblegum machine in a hair salon. Through the next few years he reinvested his profits into a three-tiered candy machine and then into a full-sized vending machine: in a competing middle school. Today he is preparing to launch Resume Righter, a service for gamifying the skills-documentation and resume writing process.

Often technical folks rely on the data and facts and algorithms and technical skill-sets to further them in their career. Lauren Rutledge coaches her candidates that being able to show some emotional intelligence will never have to worry about a job. She sees many hiring managers that would much rather have mid-level skill set with great communication and attitude than a more experienced candidate that doesn't play well with others.

Struggling to understand the engineering practices of a new system is tough. Failure to understand the business domain can lead to a critical failure. While working on trading software on Wall Street, Joshua Johnson's lack of domain knowledge led to a personal failure.

In this episode, Joshua and I discuss the importance of domain expertise, use cases, web services and the future of Big Data.

In this episode, Joe Vallone explains the alphabet soup of Scrum and agile certifications, the differences between scrum teams and enterprise scrum teams and the approaches leaders can take to shift the culture of their organizations to be agile-ready.

When an organization was struggling with a lack of productivity and $2 million into a $5 million project with nothing to show, Frank Fuglestad was brought in as a consultant to set things right. He discovered that outsourcing the project sent a message to the internal employees that they did not have the expertise to get the job done and were expendable. By moving the work internally and resetting expectations, the organization delivered the project in half the budget and tremendously improved morale.

Shifting from producer to manager, Nathen Haupt suddenly felt powerless because he couldn't directly quantify his impact on the organization anymore. After deciding to leave that position, Nathen journeyed down a path of self-discovery to re-assess his thoughts on management and motivation.

After taking a Lean Facilitation class at work, Robert Mitchell realized that leading a software development team is a lot like facilitating a role-playing game like Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. As a Game Master, you want to present the players with the challenges and help them talk through the possible options to find a resolution without railroading them into the "right" answer.