I presented a lightning talk at the Agile RTP meetup this past week. As promised, here’s the slides (cc-by/sa)…
Archive for the 'events' Category
19
Jan
Seed Conference
I just returned from the Seed Conference and all I can say is wow. This was a wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspirational event. If another one comes up, I highly recommend attending.
There was a lot of interesting information that was presented both directly and in-between the lines of the talks. It’s great to see so many inspiring individuals giving talks and hanging out at the conference. There were a ton of fresh ideas and a strong sense of innovation that was felt throughout the day.
Carlos Segura, Jason Fried, Edward Lifson, and Jim Coudal all gave great talks with good content.
If I had to boil it down to a few over-arching themes - the conference was really about truth, happiness, pride, innovation, and getting real.
I also can’t say enough about the location of the event. As someone who sits in a typical office environment most of the week, it was refreshing to be in an environment that encourages learning and has inspiration at every turn. It was also nice to be surrounded by individuals that are pushing the boundaries of our industry and unsatisfied with the status quo.
Over the next week or so, I’ll try to get around to posting some of the notes that I have from the event (1/2 a Moleskine full).
20
Dec
CodeMash - Don’t Miss It
CodeMash is a wonderful conference. This will be the second year of the conference and it’s well worth your time to attend. Unfortunately, I’m not going to make it this year (baby on the way), but I would highly recommend that you check it out if you get a chance.
There’s a great lineup of talks with some great speakers (Scott Hanselman, Jim Holmes, Neal Ford, Bruce Eckel, Joe O’Brien, Dave Donaldson, Josh Holmes, Dick Wall, and many others).
It’s certainly $175 well spent.
Overall, Agile 2007 was a wonderful experience. I really enjoyed my time at the conference and attended some really good sessions (and a few that were really bad as well). This was my first conference and I’ll be back for sure next year.
My favorite sessions included:
(Follow the links for the abstracts, presentations, and handouts)
- Agile Enterprise Rollout–The Greening of the Software Industry (Jean Tabaka, Ryan Martens)
- The Role of Leadership in Software Development (Mary Poppendieck)
- Learning Kaizen from Toyota [with MindMaps] (Mary Poppendieck, Kenji Hiranabe)
- I Don’t Like Mondays - Improving Agile Team Collaboration Events (Jean Tabaka)
- Reaching New Heights: Learning to Adapt is Essential (Susan Ershler)
- Agile adoption at Google: Potential and challenges of a true bottom-up organization (Mark Striebeck)
- The Agile Enterprise: Real World Experience in Creating Agile Companies (Jeff Sutherland)
Some of the big-picture realizations that I came to:
- Mary Poppendieck has turned into the Tom Peters of the software industry (well-deserved).
- Lean thinking has started to move to the center of the agile universe (finally).
- Executable specification / story-driven development is moving to the mainstream (finally).
- Everyone wants to scale agile.
- Everyone wants to distribute agile.
A few things that I’m concerned about:
- Lean has moved to buzzword status. A lot of people are talking about Lean but I don’t think the majority understand the essence behind it. I think this will get better.
- Everyone wants to make “Enterprisey” software with agile teams.
- There are a lot of “agile” consulting firms that are full of shit.
And some other random thoughts…
I think the fact that everyone is focused on “scaling” agility to large teams and distributed projects and that there will be a lot of agile disasters over the next couple of years. Now that the bigger software companies are moving to agile, the teams are getting too big and they are adopting agile in scary ways (too big, too fast). I think that you need to evolve to big teams, not start out there. I would also (passionately) argue that you should focus on how to have smaller software instead of how to scale agile teams to accommodate large software. I seem to be in the minority.
Lastly, I really think that the organizers of the conference need to step it up. The programs sucked (hard to read, hard to navigate, mis-prints, missing pages, etc.), the event was really hard to follow (talk duration, locations, topics), the location of the conference sucked (tight hallways, hard-to-find rooms, etc.), and the beverages and food was awful (a big thank you goes to Rally for providing everyone with bottled water).
I certainly appreciate that everyone worked hard to put this together, but I expect the basics to be nailed for a major conference.
18
Jan
CodeMash Starts!
CodeMash has started! To see what’s going on, check out technorati and flickr.
I just attended the keynote session by Neal Ford. I have to say that it was one of the best keynotes that I’ve seen in a long time. The session was “Domain Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm.”
I’ve heard that the slides will all be posted. I’ll update this post with a link to the deck when it is published.
15
Nov
CodeMash Redux
I just blogged about going to CodeMash yesterday. My abstract ended up getting accepted, so now I will be speaking at CodeMash. I’m going to be giving my “Beyond TDD: Exploring the benefits beyond testing” talk.
In addition to the great speakers that I outlined in the last post, Drew Robbins and Dave Donaldson will also be speaking. I’m looking forward to seeing the full list of sessions and speakers.
Can this event get any better 
13
Nov
CodeMash!
Go ahead and mark your calendars for January 18th and 19th for CodeMash. What is CodeMash? Well, it’s a conference that’s blending a variety of technologies, methodologies, a great community, and a unique venue for a two-day event in Ohio.
How could you go wrong with a list of great speakers (Tom and Mary Poppendieck, Bruce Eckel, Scott Guthrie, Neal Ford), great tracks (Architecture, Desktop Development, Web Development, Methodologies, Mobility), and a variety of different languages (.Net, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python).
Oh yeah, it’s also at the Kalahari Resort. Can you think of a better way to spend $149 (or cheaper if you get in on the early-bird rate)?
25
Oct
Presentation Resources
Need some good pictures for your presentations (for free)? Check out the Creative Commons Search Page and Stock Exchange. I don’t think I could ever do another presentation without these two sites.
09
Oct
devLink / Nashville
If you have a chance to make it to Nashville this Friday, you should check out devLink. Attendance is free and there is a great lineup of speakers that are set to be presenting. I’ll be up in Nashville on Thursday night and will be around all day on Friday for the conference.
The last I heard, registration is still open and there are already a ton of individuals that have registered to attend.
I don’t have the exact details yet, but I’ll be doing two chalk talks during the event. I’m looking forward to the event and I’m excited to see that the conference is covering some great topics and has the support of so many individuals.
I’ll post more details about my talks later this week as the details are ironed out.
I look foward to seeing everyone there.
22
Mar
Front Range Code Camp
The Front Range Code Camp will be held in Denver on May 20th. There should be some great sessions and everyone that can make it should try and attend to help support the local community. I plan on attending
