This post is for the purpose of contacting The Hot Iron. Have a burning question you want an answer to? Really? Well, you can submit it here. Compliments and critiques are also welcome.

Submissions to the form below will never be posted as public comments, and I will respond to the email address you enter in the form below. Providing, of course, I believe you are a real human being asking the question.

Note I am not actively solicitating guest posts, so please don’t even bother asking.

Thanks for visiting The Hot Iron!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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A timeout for a little self-promotion as I am proud to announce I am now a Certified ScrumMaster® or CSM. Last week I took a 2-day course and over the weekend I passed the exam from the Scrum Alliance to become a CSM.

What is a CSM?

A CSM is a practitioner of the Scrum. With its origins in software development, Scrum is “framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.” The Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum and is one of 3 roles on a Scrum team. The team delivers software, or whatever the work product is, in an iterative approach over periods of time called sprints, where a sprint can last a few weeks to a month.

There is much more to Scrum, and I will be writing more about it in the future. A good guide to Scrum is called simply The Scrum Guide by the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, and you can read it at ScrumGuides.org. The definition of Scrum quoted above comes from The Scrum Guide. Among the myriad of books out there on Scrum is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland that I previously read and wrote takeaways about.

Now what?

One thing that was clear to me from the course is that Scrum is a framework you must actively participate in to gain your expertise. I will be taking a two-prong approach to this. For my job, I will be discussing Scrum with leadership. As well, I will be using Scrum in my personal life to manage my multiple activities and projects.

Just the Beginning

I am excited for this certification. The course and test were a tremendous learning opportunity, and I look forward to continued learning to maintain the certification. Of course more importantly is applying what I learned and honing my skills in Scrum. Special thanks to my instructor Mike Stuedemann and my classmates Ibrahim, Nelia, Nicole and Rod for a fun and engaging learning experience.

Certified ScrumMaster® is a certification mark of Scrum Alliance, Inc. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Where I am in no hurry for my own children to become teenagers, something else in my life has reached that milestone – this blog.

Over the last 13 years I have used The Hot Iron as a platform for whatever is on my mind. In the beginning it was more frequent, and over time it has not been as much. Interestingly as I am writing this post I went back to the archives to see how many times I wrote here in 2019 as it seemed like more than in recent years, but that wasn’t the case. Perhaps I was just thinking about it more this year?

If you are reading this, you are one of the few and much-appreciated people who have stuck with me for some time to read this, and for this I am very grateful. I gave up years ago on making promises for writing more, but I have not given up completely on this site.

As this will be my last post for the year, may the new decade beginning on January 1, 2020 be a time where all that you want becomes real!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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A few weeks ago I attended what I will call a "meta meetup" – it was a showcase of business and technology meetup networking groups in Northeast Wisconsin. The event was called Meet the Meetups and was a local version of a similar event held in the Milwaukee area.

Following the event I reached out to the organizers and shared with them how I wished something like this took place a couple of years ago when I moved to the area. My quest for such groups when I first arrived here was nowhere near as bountiful as what I encountered at this gathering in Green Bay.

As one of my goals for the coming year is to immerse myself more in technology – both in general and local – I am sharing this list of meetup groups here. Perhaps it can help someone looking now as I did then, and perhaps I will see you at one of their events?

Rising Tide Society / Tuesday's Together

BAM (Big Data, Advanced Analytics, and Machine Learning)

The Nest

Women In Entrepreneurship - Northeast Wisconsin

Current - Young Professionals (Green Bay Chamber)

1 Million Cups

Green Bay Power BI User Group

Northeast Wisconsin Cloud Users Group

Fox Valley Dev Ops

Northeast Wisconsin Agile Users Group

Digital Fertilizer

Wisconsin UX

ReactJS Green Bay

Fox Valley Business Data Intelligence and Analytics

Fox Valley Microsoft Data Platform

Fox Valley Game Development

WI Kentico User Group

Northeast Wisconsin Developers Users Group

Fox Valley Sharepoint User Group

Thought-Hacking Wisconsin

I would like to share one that was not at this event, but is also a worthwhile networking and learning opportunity. Women in Technology Wisconsin hosts monthly events and networking, and is not only for women – I know, I have attended one of their events.

If you know of other networking opportunities in Northeast Wisconsin for business and technology, please share them in the comments of this post.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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If you are one of the proud readers of The Hot Iron who reads my posts in your email inbox, please note I am changing how those emails are delivered. To ensure you continue to receive them, you will need to “whitelist” the email address new posts will be coming from.

That email address is: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Why and How?

In this pervasive world of spam email, you can “whitelist” email addresses to indicate you want to receive mail from it, whether it’s a person, business or – in this case – a blog.

As there are a variety of email services people use, there are a variety of ways to do so. If you are not familiar with this process, look to see how you can do the following with the email address above:

• Add it to your Contacts
• Add it as a Trusted Sender
• Add it to a Whitelist
• Check your marketing, promotions or spam folder and mark the email address as Not Spam

Switch Email Delivery Now

If you would like to switch to the new email delivery now, simply click this link to subscribe by email and enter your information. You will receive a confirmation email once you have been added to the list. Eventually I will move all email addresses to the new service and discontinue the old one.

Check into RSS and Check Back

As it’s always good to have a Plan B, there are a couple of ways to check if you are missing any posts from this blog. One way is to subscribe to the RSS Feed within your Web browser or email app. There are also mobile apps for subscribing to feeds. However if this is something you can’t or don’t want to do, please check back at the Web site at thehotiron.com and see if there are posts you have missed. If so, please contact me and I will help you get it resolved.

Please let me know if you have any questions on any of this in the comments to this post, and thanks for reading!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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