As most of you probably know I’m on my way to leave the country and do other type of work for a while. It’s been a bumpy ride and we’re actually still waiting for the work permits before we can leave. Any day now…
The last couple of weeks I’ve ended most of my commitments and different consultant contracts with my customers, but I don’t have anything else to do… so I thought I’ll make something up. Two things popped into my head:
- last year when I did some free presentations during a period between employments
- and the fact that I don’t want to come back in 3 years and just continue with the same material
From IMDB
People who read this blog knows that I love constraints, and people that know me knows that I’m a Seinfeld buff. He imposed a constraint on himself after 10-15 years in the business. He retired all of his jokes and went on a tour called “I’m telling you for the last time”. After that he started over with a blank sheet and never told those jokes again.
No comparison between mr Seinfeld and me but I he inspired me to try the same. So I’m giving the presentations one last time and then retire them forever. I will never reuse the slides, I will present the materials in new ways. I promise!
You can join me for one or more of the presentations 25 - 29 november 2013. And as opposed from Seinfeld it’s free. We’ll also record it and you can catch it later. I will update the post with links later.
When you try to do something like this it’s awesome to have a company like Aptitud to back you up. The first time I posed the suggestion of doing something like this, us giving these presentations for free for example; their immediate reaction was just “YES! Awesome! Go for it!” Karma - that’s what we run Aptitud on.
The idea is that we run a one hour lecture during lunch, just like the ordinary Aptitud lunches. It’s doesn’t cost you anything (as always) but you might pick some stuff up.
Here is the program for the week in question.
| Time | Heading | Abstract |
|---|---|---|
| Monday 25/11 | Kanban In Action | Slides, Recording |
| This presentation introduces you to the principles of kanban and lean and how to apply them in practice. You can start using kanban as you leave! | ||
| Tuesday 26/11 | What is Lean? | (No slides, no recording - it was a workshop) |
| Have you heard about Lean (and agile) but don’t know what it means, or what you can do about it? In this presentation you’ll get answer to all of the answers you didn’t dare to ask anywhere else. | ||
| Wednesday 27/11 | Specification by example | Slides, Recording |
| Specification by example is the missing step for most development teams. It will help you to communicate better with your business stakeholders making sure that you build the right thing. As a interesting and rewarding side effect you can get regression tests for free. Oh yeah - and a documentation that is always up-to-date. This presentation introduces you to the basic concepts and gives you help to get started | ||
| Thursday 27/11 | SpecFlow – a whirlwind tour | Slides, Recording |
| Specification by example is not about technology - it’s about communication. This presentation however is all about the technology. I’ll show you some common tools and also some coding techniques that will help you avoid problems in keeping your test-code working as the system grow | ||
| Friday 28/11 | User stories - how to get the most out of them | Slides, Recording |
| User stories is the de facto standard to handle requirements in agile projects. But what are they really? And how do I do estimation with them? Or planning for that matter? Is there any special tricks or pitfalls that I should know of? In this presentation I’ll share my experience with working with user stories - good and bad. |
I’ve shortened some of the presentations up quite a bit (from 3-4 hours to 1 hour in some cases) so be prepared for speed…
Pick one, or come to all. Our office is quite small so please use the links above to register for the events. so we know how much food we need to bring. Anders has promised to add canned laughter if any of the presentations draw zero people in the audience. So I hope for that too… :)
This is the last time you’ll hear these presentation from me.