Author: jfox@blulantern.com
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Blak and Blu: AI Ethics and The Growing Organizational Intelligence Deficit
What started as a casual catch-up with my friend Mike morphed into something far more illuminating than either of us anticipated. Like most conversations that begin with “How’s life?” we expected the usual pleasantries about family and work. Instead, we found ourselves excavating the philosophical foundations of modern business practice, using AI ethics as our…
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Building PO Artifactor
As a Product Owner, producing artifacts — from roadmaps to Eisenhower matrices, pitch decks to phase diagrams — is a constant demand. Yet, creating these manually drains time that could be spent on strategy and decision-making. The PO Artifactor project set out to automate this process, leveraging AI to generate, format, and distribute these assets…
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From Idea to MVP in a Week
For years, my coworkers and I have bonded over fantasy football through the Sleeper app. Beyond the friendly competition, I always appreciated Sleeper’s intuitive interface and the little UX details that made managing my team a joy. When I discovered they offered a public API, my mind immediately began racing. As both a sports enthusiast…
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Turning the Job hunt Into a Springboard for New Passion Projects
When I first began exploring new opportunities in the job market, I expected the process to be purely about polishing my resume, sending applications, and preparing for interviews. Instead, it became something much bigger — a personal challenge to prove to myself what I could truly accomplish. Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t…
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Cache 22
How the Observer Design Pattern + Caching Can Turbocharge Your Laravel 12 Apps Introduction: The Cache Conundrum We’ve all been there: your Laravel app is lightning-fast on day one, but as your data grows and user activity spikes, page loads start feeling like they’re stuck in molasses. You add caching to speed things up —…
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Estimation Frustration
Turning a Team’s Hatred of Estimation into a More Productive, Less Stressful Practice If you’ve worked in Scrum for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that estimation is one of the most universally disliked activities in software development. It’s not that people are lazy—it’s that estimating is tricky business. It feels like predicting the…
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Data-Driven Product Decisions: Beyond Basic Analytics
When Numbers Lie… You ever had that moment where you thought you finally cracked the code on product analytics? Your platform is showing massive growth—monthly active users climbing steadily, API calls increasing quarter-over-quarter, and dashboard sessions are through the roof. Everybody is loving the hockey stick charts. Investors are sniffing around for the Series B.…
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How to Actually Measure Scrum Success (It’s Not What You Think)
When executives ask “How do we know if this Scrum thing is working?”, they’re usually bracing for some elaborate new measurement framework. Here’s the twist: you probably don’t need one. This might sound anticlimactic, especially to consultants selling complex measurement dashboards. But there’s psychological genius here: people already resist change, so why pile on unfamiliar…
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Is LeSS More? Scaling LeSS vs SAFe
So you’re trying to scale agile beyond a single team, huh? Been there. After years of writing code and then somehow ending up as a Scrum Master (funny how that happens), I’ve seen organizations wrestle with this question: do we go with Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) or the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)? Spoiler alert: it’s complicated,…
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The Technical Product Owner’s Guide to API-First Product Strategy
The $10 Million API Mistake Picture this: You’ve just launched what you think is a killer B2B product. Your UI is slick, your features are solid, and early customers seem happy. But six months later, you’re hemorrhaging deals because enterprise clients can’t integrate your product into their existing workflows. Sound familiar? This exact scenario cost…