I’m John Miller and I have a passion for learning new ways to solve old problems. I’ve been a consultant for the largest part of my career which has given me the opportunity to work with many different species of software teams. Both those that seem to be doing everything right…as well as a few that always seemed to have the odds stacked against them. In either case, I enjoy the process of learning to adapt to work within each unique group dynamic, and finding ways to increase the quality of the software we produce while cutting waste and unnecessary churn.
Whether it’s software development or another path of choice, I believe everyone deserves the opportunity to have a career that stimulates excitement and passion…rather than just null time that exists between weekends. Life’s too short to waste it on the the mundane!
On the technical side, I’m a dabbler. I like exploring new platforms and languages to see what makes them tick. My biggest strengths are in the .Net stack and a variety of related OSS tools, but I also enjoy digging into other stacks such as nodejs and ruby.
In January of 2011 I decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for years, work for myself. So Gemba Labs was born. At the moment it’s just a way for me to do independent contract work but hope to expand it down the road into a product company. Stay tuned!
As for the name, Wikipedia describes “Gemba” as a Japanese term meaning “the real place”. In lean, gemba is the place where core processes are happening and it’s where to go to fully understand how the business really works. Which makes it the best place to go to find ways to improve production. In software development, this means we need to work side-by-side with the end-users to give us real insight on how the applications we are building should be designed.