Mark Avenius and Family Migrate Around America
By Erik HansenMark Avenius has taken the concept of working remotely to an elevated level. In late June, he and his wife, Nadia, finished packing their three young sons and two dogs into their brand-new Highland Ridge “Open Range” 40-foot trailer and drove away from their recently sold Detroit-area home. They’re taking their lessons learned during the pandemic about remote work and school and applying them to a nomadic life. Over the next year their plan is to circumnavigate the lower 48 states. Most likely, the Avenius family will return to the same Detroit area and school district where their two oldest sons are still enrolled.
“If we’re ever going to do this, now is the time to do it,” Mark said. “We are still trying to stay socially distanced from people and still isolating.”
For the past five years, Mark, Nadia, and the boys have taken regular trips in a pop-up camper. However, that all stopped at the height of the pandemic due to the pop-up’s lack of a bathroom and the family wisely avoiding public restrooms with Felix being an infant. When they noticed things were improving with Covid-19, they started doing some camping in Michigan’s state parks close to home. This past April, these trips prompted them to trade in their 14-foot popup camper for a 25-foot travel trailer with a toilet and shower.
Out of necessity, Marc and Nadia started researching how to take care of the trailer for all the things they never had to deal with before, like emptying the septic system. Soon, the possibilities of doing something bigger began to grow.
“The people we were looking at to get information from are these YouTubers who have time to record videos about how to charge your battery bank, or
whatever,” Mark recalled. “The people who have time to do that are the ones who live in their RVs full time.”
Also, both Mark and Nadia noticed these people had kids, too.
“That just kept poking us and saying, ‘Hey, this is something that people do,” Mark said. “We saw that they have kids, too, and having your kids in the RV and
Sailing and Teamwork are Lifelong Passions for Charley Rathkopf
By Erik Hansenas partake in the races himself.
Charley motors out to a sailboat race location on the Puget Sound where he helped run the event. Sailboat racing has been part of Charley’s life, and that of his family’s, since his childhood in Florida.
For Platform Services engineer Charley Rathkopf, sailing has been deeply ingrained in his life since he was a young boy in Florida. Charley joined Skykick in February 2020, four weeks before the pandemic shut down our home office. While growing up in The Sunshine State, Charley learned to race sailing boats, a pastime he’s been active with ever since. He moved to the Puget Sound area in 1997 after a few years in the Peace Core and some time back in Florida. Once established here, Charley began helping organize and run sailboat races, as well
In fact, this is the fourth city Charley has lived in where he initially didn’t know anyone but quickly learned where and when people go sailing in Seattle.
“The teamwork is really fun,” Charley noted, who is practiced with sailing various sized boats. “Once you know what you’re doing and have some experience, you can get on a team anywhere.”
If you want to learn more about how to get involved, just let Charley know. Also, check out the full interview with Charley to learn more about the local sailing life.
The Avenius family, on a late-spring hike, are two-year-old Felix (top left), Nadia, Mark, eight-year-old Xander (bottom left) and six-year-old Lucas. Photo: Mr. Mark Avenius See Avenius Family on page 4Letter From the Editor: Covid Whiplash
Think back to early spring.
In the United States, we were still grappling with how to safely be around each other, and the Centers for Disease Control released guidance encouraging us all to double mask to avoid catching and spreading Covid. Now, in the middle of summer, many states—including Washington on June 30—have dropped their mask mandates in response to relatively high vaccination rates. With no masks, social distancing phasing out, and indoor venue capacity limits falling to pre-pandemic norms, we’re suddenly confronted with getting used to being face-toface and in crowds again. It’s all a little awkward and a bit stressful.
Relearning our social skills after a year-and-a-half of isolation will take time, and our newsletter speaks to this transition. From the inaugural adventure of the SkyKick hiking group, shown at right, to the new work and home-life balance Mark Avenius and family have recently undertaken, we are all emerging from this traumatic experience and rediscovering old ways to connect while embracing new ones.
--Erik Hansen, Agile Coach, EditorSkyKick Engineering Newsletter
A quarterly publication by and for SkyKick’s Engineering Department: unity and community!
Q2 2021 Recap|Vol. 3, Issue 1
Publisher: Stacey Gardella
Editor: Erik Hansen
Designer: Erik Hansen
Contributing writers: Adam Prescott, Tony Maszara, and Erik Hansen.
Please send your questions, comments, or, even better yet, story ideas to Erik at erik.hansen@skykick.com. You can ping him, too. He won’t mind at all, seriously.
SkyKick Hiking Group Hits the Hills
On Friday, May 21 the SkyKick Hiking Group held its first trip into the local mountains along the Rattlesnake Ledge trail, south of I-90’s exit 32. The weather afforded amazing views for (at top, from left) Krishna Tamburino, Nixon Ball, Jeremiah Hall, Katy O’Rourke, Erik Hansen, Aditya Mohan, Greg Bobgan, and Adrian Balfour.
Leadership Corner: Stacey and Saddie
By Erik HansenFor this edition of the Leadership Corner our Direcor of Engineering -Operations, Stacey Gardella, walks the talk in these post-vaccine-transition times. Here, Stacey and her new horse, Saddie, turn the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” into reality when training recently at their show-horse barn. Stacey gets fashion bonus points for wearing her 2020 to 2021 dumpster fire before-and-after t-shirt.
If you’re wondering about what Saddie is wearing, it is not a covid-transmission-preventing face mask. Rather, it’s one of her favorite feed bags. As far as we know, horses only spread joy and love, not Covid.
Such pictures will begin to fade into our collective memory in Washington as the state-wide mask mandates dropped at the end of June and we began to see more and more people out and about choosing to free themselves of their face masks in the wake of high vaccination rates.
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Saddie and Stacey show how to mask up properly. Photo: A barnmate
Photo montage: Aditya Mohan
Take Care, the Grass is Brown Everywhere
By Adam PrescottYou should switch jobs. Life would be better at a different company.
I mean, they’ve got better perks, better teams, better brand, better mission, better everything, and with none of the problems of your current company. Things would be so good over there. Right?
The reality is, there’s a pretty good chance the new company won’t be much better than the one you’re with now — but maybe that’s actually good news.
Two traps like to catch us all. First, there’s the “grass is greener ” syndrome, where we fantasize about all the things we don’t have. The other is good old-fashioned pessimism, which makes everything look unfixable and hopeless.
When these forces collide, the desire to opt-out becomes incredibly strong. That’s when we start looking for a new job or become susceptible to those pokes from recruiters.
Now, it very well could be true that it’s time for you to move on, that it’s time for a change. The truth is, though, that every company has its own set of problems; the grass is brown everywhere. The secret to satisfaction is realizing what’s important to you, finding a place that checks enough boxes, and embracing it for what it provides.
How do you know when enough is enough, and how do you take inventory of what matters most? Let’s start by digging deeper into why the next might not be better than your potential ex.
The company you work for doesn’t matter
Lie number one in the book Nine Lies About Work is that the company you work for matters, i.e., it doesn’t.
Through this process, the ADP Research Institute has determined that the following eight specifically-worded aspects are strong indicators of a high-performing team:
1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
5. My teammates have my back.
6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
7. I have great confidence in my company’s future.
8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
North Seattle; Erik Hansen Authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall explain that significant research has determined what makes happy, productive employees. The way this is done, they say, is by asking lots of questions to lots of teams. When done, you take responses from the highest performing teams and compare them to responses from average and low-performing teams. Then, you look for the trends.
These “pulse statements” are genius. It’s not obvious at first glance, but they aim to measure an employee’s sense of self (even numbers) and team (odd numbers) in each of four different categories: purpose (1 and 2), excellence (3 and 4), support (5 and 6), and future (7 and 8).
High marks indicate someone who feels good about themselves, their team, and their company. Given the reliability of these indicators, one would assume the best companies have higher scores than bad companies.
But that’s not what Buckingham and Goodall found.
Instead, they discovered that companies, good and bad alike, tended
See Grass, page 5
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Are there more flowers than weeds on the other side of the fence? Take your time to think it through before hopping over. Photo: Evanston P-Patch,
Mark and Family are on the Move
Agile Corner: It’s Process FAQ Time
By Tony Maszara and Erik HansenCertain questions about the SkyKick Agile process have become perennial, guaranteed to blossom within most teams at some point. If they’re not addressed collectively, they may become engrained and threaten to overrun parts of a team’s process, like chickweed in a vegetable garden. Below are a few of the most common, in-the-weeds questions.
Should we switch to Kanban from Scrum?
Avenius Family, from page 1 doing full time isn’t completely insane. I mean, it’s not not insane.”
Mark joked about it to Nadia, saying to her it’d be cool to live in the RV full time with their three boys. She initially brushed it off, calling the notion nuts, and saying they wouldn’t do homeschooling. Even though Mark wasn’t serious, an idea was planted, and it began to grow when he noticed Nadia also watching the full-time RV travelers’ streams.
“She saw one video in particular where the parents interviewed the kids and said, ‘What do you think about living on the road?’ for however long it had been,” Mark recalled. “The kids were like, ‘It’s amazing! I know I could never have had the same experience without doing what we did.’”
These stories helped the once nutty idea blossom into a plan. Mark and Nadia also knew the coming year was going to be more of the same with the boys taking virtual school again for 2021-22, where Xander will be in third grade and Lucas will be in first grade. Their youngest, Felix, isn’t
in preschool yet, which Mark said took some schooling pressure off the table. Also, thanks to the pandemic, the family is not doing sports right now. In pre-pandemic times Mark was coaching the boys’ soccer and hockey teams. With all these factors coming together, they traded in their 25-foot trailer for their current 40foot trailer, sold their place, and hit the road.
“We were going to be in the house again,” Mark said. “So, why not just take the house with us and go?”
They realized that if they waited until the boys were older, Mark and Nadia would be breaking them out of important friend circles and social connections that both school and organized sports give kids.
“So, why don’t we just turn these state trips into a lap around the country and see what happens?”
To learn more about Mark and Nadia’s mobile life, watch Mark’s great SkyKick Sip ‘n’ Learn talk. Also, be sure to check out their new YouTube channel, Avenius Adventures to see how their travels on the road are treating them, the kids, and dogs.
It 100% depends on the type of work the team does. Kanban and Scrum can be considered two different Agile tools for two different jobs. A general rule to remember is if more than 50% of the work being done is unplanned work (chaos), then Kanban may be a better framework to use. If at least 50% of the work being done is planned and prioritized, then Scrum is the better choice.
Overall, Kanban has less overhead in the form of fewer meetings and no sprint commitments, features a faster throughput than Scrum, and is reactive in nature: pulling in work as it arrives instead of planning and committing to it at the beginning of the sprint. Because of its simple and flexible workflow, Kanban accommodates constant chaos work and, as a result, shines for teams focused on production support. However, flexibility and accommodation can also create disadvantages. Working within Kanban can feel chaotic and less satisfying at times since there is no set plan being committed-to and executed on by the team. It’s just a constant stream of work without a finish line.
This all noted, before making a switch it’s important the problems your team has with the current process, either Scrum or Kanban,
See Agile on page 6
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Mark flew his drone to snap this shot of their former, rooted home with their new truck-and-trailer out front: their new home for the next year. Photo: Avenius
Don’t Sacrifice What You Have in Pursuit of What You Don’t
Grass, from page 3
to have the same distribution of responses. There was more variance between teams within the same company than between different companies. In other words, your team matters but the company doesn’t.
But what about all the articles and research that goes into those “best places to work” lists? Buckingham and Goodall tell us these are important influencers of why we join a company. The culture and perks are there to sell future candidates on the promise of lush, green pastures.
However, those coveted perks like 20%-time, gym memberships, and free lunches lose their luster quickly, and then you’re back to the reality of being mostly at the mercy of your team. Their research supports this, too. They found that members of
Good, Clean Teams Fun
a good team at a bad company will stay longer than those on a bad team of a good company.
Taking inventory
Okay, so it’s the team that matters. That doesn’t change the fact that things might not feel super rosy where you’re at. How do you know when enough’s enough?
That’s a very personal question, and the answer is one that’s going to be very different for everybody since we’re all at different stages in our lives and careers and have different needs and values.
Indeed, a great place to start is by self-reflecting on your own responses to the eight pulse-statements above. If you’re feeling bad on most of them, that’s a red flag. It doesn’t mean there’s no hope, but it’s not great for your long-term outlook. If you’re in that boat, my suggestion is to have a conversation with your boss. Tell them about ADP’s research and your responses. Consider a similar conversation with the team.
I also love this article by Jessica Donahue, PHR. She describes a coaching conversation she had with her boss where her boss asked her to “take stock of what’s important to you at work and put those things through a force-rank.” Her boss asked her to consider things like the people she works with, growth opportunities, job flexibility, and how much money she made.
In other words, find what matters
most.
And in her case, she determined that her company’s lack of profitability — the thing that had her questioning if it was time to move on — wasn’t as important as the things her job did provide. Her top three needs were being met really well. That realization helped her to overcome, in her words, a piss-poor attitude. She
ultimately stayed with the company through bankruptcy and liquidation.
Conclusion
Every career is going to have its ups and downs. We’re all going to have moments where things feel less than great. It’s impossible not to look out the window and dream about what could be.
Consider what you’re leaving behind before you jump ship, though. Acknowledge that no matter how careful you are — no matter how much research and diligence you pour into searching — you’re about to enter into a game of team roulette that will ultimately decide your satisfaction. The team matters most, and leaving a great team for a lesser one isn’t easily undone. Make sure you’re not already sitting on a great thing before being lured away by another company’s shine. Know what’s important to you and discuss your needs that aren’t being met. You might find it’s easier to unlock happiness by fixing your everything-except situation than it is to throw everything in the air and hope for something better. Fixing it benefits everyone.
Finally, if you go through all this — your engagement scores from the pulse statements are low, you’ve determined your most important needs aren’t being met, and you’ve had conversations with your boss to no avail— then maybe it’s time for a change. Part of the gamble is that you might end up in a better place, right? Take solace in knowing that you’re exiting for the right reasons, and find that better something.
was previously published earlier in 2021 on ILLUMINATION
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Adam Prescott, Skykick’s Director of Engineering on the Platform Services side of the house, like’s coding, writing, a well-crafted punchline, and goofing off with his kids. His article
Above, SRE Developer Brad Burrick’s son, Grayson, lent him a hand during a recent “Among Us!” team party. Photo: Katy O’Rourke. Below, SRE Director Paul Petterson rocks his new cut-andpaste look. Montage: Steve Mentzer
Giving Our Agile Lead Garren Heye a Fond Farewell
On Wednesday, June 30, Skykick wished Garren Heye the best as he wound down working with the Agile Team and Engineering Department. One of our original Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, Garren joined Skykick in the summer of 2016. This spring he graduated from the University of Washington’s MBA program. Shortly thereafter he accepted a postion with F5 at their new downtown Seattle skyscraper where he’ll work as a Product Manager in their support organization. Cheers, Garren!
Some of Our Favorite Agile Process Questions Answered
Agile, from page 4 are clearly addressed first. In most instances, small adjustments in your Agile workflow the team collectively agrees on, and then implements, will fix your issues without having to scrap the whole thing and start over.
Should we re-estimate stories at the end of the sprint?
Generally speaking, no we should not. Since we work using an average story-point velocity, which we derive from a six-sprint cycle, we do not need to get hung up on making sure our estimates for a given sprint are 100% precise. However, after completing a story, if we think it was severely over or underestimated, than it’s okay to re-estimate during the Sprint Review session. Re-estimation could be due to the team agreeing the story had unanticipated changes to its acceptance criteria, experienced significant scope creep, or was less complex than previously thought. To help figure this out, ask if we think a story should have been two or more points greater than, or less than, the original estimate. If everyone agrees the answer is yes in either direction, then it’s okay to re-estimate.
Shouldn’t we get partial credit for unfinished stories?
No. Since we use the average veloci-
ty of the last six sprints, giving partial credit is pointless. It will all even out in the end and still be accurate. Importantly, a story is not considered complete until the Definition of Done and Acceptance Criteria are met. Giving partial credit for an unfinished story would be in direct opposition to a story’s definition of done and create a potentially misleading impression about the health of a story and its related work. Think of it in a culinary sense. A half-cooked chicken may appear done, and even taste pretty good, but partially barbequed chicken could make you wicked sick in the near future.
Why don’t story points equal hours?
Even though estimating using hours seems more straightforward, it becomes increasingly inaccurate the larger the thing your estimating becomes. In short, humans are terrible at estimating things in units of time. A good way of envisioning this concept is to think of writing. If someone were to ask you to estimate the time it would take to write a sentence, your guess would probably be super accurate. If you were asked to estimate how long it would take to write a paragraph, it might still be relatively accurate but less so.
If asked how long writing a chapter would take, let alone an entire
book, such guesses would be wildly inaccurate (George R.R. Martin anyone?). Using story points helps us get around this by considering complexity, risk, and effort simultaneously rather than time alone. A story point being more abstract than an hour is its greatest strength, and story points are proven to result in more accurate estimations as a result.
Should we make sure everyone is 100% utilized during planning?
Nope. Optimizing for the individual will put the focus on assigning individuals work as opposed to taking on work as a team. This will result in siloing and working on things out of priority order. It is important to remember Agile is all about the team and not the individual. We succeed as a team and fail as a team.
Another reason to not plan for 100% utilization is that doing so fails to account for unplanned work which commonly appears during the sprint. It’s recommended to account for about 20% of unplanned work entering any given sprint. If the team ends up not having much unplanned work, they can always collectively agree to bring in more work, if sprint-time allows. In other words, it’s okay to hold back some capictiy for chaos, which is different from padding your estimates, a big no no.
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Positive and hardworking to the last, Garren on his final day as a Skykicker. Stacey Gardella baked him a Retro for his going away party! Photos: Hansen, Gardella
