Shambling Towards Perfection

Last night I started dismantling my Wall o' Stickies representing my product backlog and finished items,  and before I did so I figured I'd take some photos to commemorate all the hard work documented on my walls. Here's the final state of the backlog and finished item areas: As you can see I started to run out of room in the finished section there at the end. And here the finished items are, nicely stacked into piles for each sprint: The backlog contains a lot of items that were OBE (overcome by events) by being rewritten and implemented in a slightly different way, plus some ponies and things that turned out to be too big or not necessary after all. I'll have to go back through these later this summer and get rid of the OBE items and rewrite the rest. Some of them I would still like to implement, so I'll probably do a sprint or two and knock out a few items. Plus there were a few bugs that turned up at the end, so I do need to fix those. So there are...

So now that my Master of Science degree is complete, I've decided to start working on the The Knitting Guild Assocation 's (TKGA)  Masters Program - Hand Knitting . There are 3 levels, and the first involves knitting a mitten plus 16 swatches, writing a report and answering questions about the swatches. On the surface it seems pretty easy, but from reading the Ravelry group's posts  I'm quite convinced that it's not. The knitting has to be technically nearly perfect: no weird stretched out stitches, no "rowing out" (in stockinette, where your purls and knits aren't the same tension so there's a visible difference between rows), etc. The swatches and mitten are to be blocked, which helps with some things, but not everything. It's extremely common to have to re-knit and/or re-write things, even by very experienced knitters (e.g. people who've been knitting 30 or 40 years). It should be plenty challenging for me. I'm currently working on...