Global Day of Coderetreat 2012: Utah Style

Global Day of Coderetreat (GDCR) is coming up on December 8th this year.

Don't know what Coderetreat is? Check out http://coderetreat.org/about

Don't know what GDCR is? Check out http://globalday.coderetreat.org/

Pluralsight (@pluralsight) and Ancestry.com (@Ancestrydotcom) are sponsoring two Coderetreats in Utah. David Adsit (@davidadsit) is organizing both (I personally think he's a little crazy for doing that, but David is a little crazy). They will be at the two Pluralsight offices (Layton and Lehi).

You can register for one of the two events below on Eventbrite.

If you’re in Utah County or South Salt Lake County…
Facilitated by Kay Johansen (@utahkay)
http://lehi-ut-coderetreat.eventbrite.com/
http://coderetreat.org/events/global-day-of-coderetreat-2012-lehi-utah-us

If you live further north…
Facilitated by Jim Cooper (@jimthecoop)
http://layton-ut-coderetreat.eventbrite.com/
http://coderetreat.org/events/global-day-of-coderetreat-2012-layton-utah-us

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact David or me directly or check out http://utahsc.org/ for more updates.

Agile and the Chasm

In the book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Project, Geoffrey Moore discusses the idea that technologies start with early adopters and at some point must “cross the chasm” to majority.

At the recent Salt Lake Agile Roundtable meeting, there was a brief exchange on if Agile had crossed the chasm.

My thought (which is informed by recent experiences with the majority) is that the term “Agile” and some of the practices (Scrum/Scrum-like practices) have crossed the chasm but the values expressed in the manifesto have not.

What do you think?  What has your experience been?

Does the Manifesto matter?

I recently had the chance to interview candidates for a position on my team.  I put together a list of questions that I believed would be a unique and effective way of phone screening candidates.  Without giving away the whole list (I may disclose it later), here are the first two questions:

1. Tell me something about yourself that isn’t on your resume.
2. Are you familiar with the Agile Manifesto?

I had two out of seven candidates that I phone screen answer in the affirmative to question 2.  Now not being familiar with the Agile Manifesto isn’t necessarily uncommon, I guess.  But the inconsistency came from the answer to the next question:

“What Agile practices are you familiar with and/or have used?”

I figured the answers would be “I haven’t used any”.  Because if you have done “Agile practices” you’d certainly know what the Agile Manifesto is, right… right?

BUT…

the answers were mostly in the “like, Scrum? Stand ups? Yeah, we do that stuff on my team.”

So… these candidates had presumably been introduced to the term Agile, to some Agile practices but hadn’t taken the time to investigate further, to understand the roots of the Agile movement, to do a quick Google search!  Granted none of them had incredible answers to the Agile practices question, but they did have answers.

I guess I just don’t get it.  I mean, I do.  But I don’t.

Would this matter to you?

CodeRandori.com and AgileCodeGames.com

I recently purchased these domains and while I have plans for them, I haven’t done anything yet.  So I decided to just have them forward here to my blog for the time being.

The plan for CodeRandori.com is to have a “one stop” resource for what a Code Randori is, how to facilitate and some example problems to use.

I’m not entirely sure about AgileCodeGames.com  I was thinking maybe to have a “Tasty Cupcakes”-like site but for coding games (like katas and randori and pairing games) but I’m not sure.

So what do you think?  Any ideas on what to build at these domains beyond what I’ve planned?

On Speaking… and not speaking

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working to expand my speaking footprint this year beyond Utah.  This started out pretty well with a three session gig at Boise Code Camp which was a blast.  There is a great dev community up in Boise and I plan on going back next year.  I was able to attend Agile Games 2012 in Boston which was amazing.  Need to do a write up on that soon before everything leaks out of my brain :)   Again, more great people and I felt super enriched after the three days.

Unfortunately, around that time, my sessions were turned down for MADExpo and Chicago Code Camp.  I was pretty bummed about it, more than I thought I would be.  I plan to try again next year and market my sessions better.  Need to figure out how to get more buzz words into my titles :)

Happily I have been accepted to Agile Roots.  I’ll be running “Hands-on Group TDD with Randori” (title pending).

Additionally, I’ll be presenting at the Utah .Net User Group this Thursday (May 10, 2012) on “Linq (from the inside)”.

I’m still waiting on Portland Code Camp and Seattle Code Camp which I hope to still speak at.  I’ll likely go to Portland Code Camp either way as we’ll be in Portland to visit family.

I am hoping to attend SCNA in Chicago in November.  And that should round out the year.  Should be exciting!

Utah Code Camp Spring 2012 Slide Decks

I had the opportunity to speak at Utah Code Camp again (my fourth code camp presenting Fall 2011 Spring 2011 Fall 2010) which was a lot of fun. Not sure if I would do three presentations again, but it was a lot of fun and I met a lot of great people.

If you attended one of my sessions, please take a minute to rate the session at SpeakerRate (not official eval… please do that too):

• Rate Code Katas: Practicing Your Craft
• Rate Randori: Group Practice 
• Rate Linq (from the inside)

Here are the slide decks. Contact me with any questions!

Randori: Group Practice

View more presentations from Mike Clement

The Randori starter project is available at https://github.com/mdclement/NumbersToLcdRandoriBase

The Code Katas session was presented as two slide decks.  One with the introductory material and the other with the guided FizzBuzz kata.

Code Katas Spring 2012

View more presentations from Mike Clement

FizzBuzz Guided Kata

View more presentations from Mike Clement

Linq (from the inside)

View more presentations from Mike Clement

The code base that I started from (tests and methods without implementation) is available at https://github.com/mdclement/Linq--from-the-inside--Presentation-Base

Expanding my Speaking Footprint in 2012

So one of the things that I plan to do more of this year is presenting at Code Camps and the like.  I’ve presented several times at Utah Code Camp (Spring 2011, Fall 2011), but want to expand my footprint.  So, I’m currently submitted to Boise Code Camp, Chicago Code Camp and MADExpo.  Over the next few weeks/months I’ll see how well my session topics are received outside of the Utah community.  I also plan to submit to Portland Code Camp and Agile Roots this year once their calls for speakers are open.

If you’ve attended (and hopefully enjoyed) previous sessions that I’ve presented, please rate me at http://speakerrate.com/mdclement

The topics that I’ve been submitting (and that I’ll be presenting at Utah Code Camp Spring 2012) are listed below along with the abstract.  I’m looking forward to an exciting year of meeting with developer communities both inside and outside of Utah!

Linq (From the Inside)

Knowing how to use Linq is useful if you're doing any coding using .NET 3.5 or newer.  But have you ever thought about what is going on "under the hood"?

Join us as we dive into the guts of Linq and implement Linq extension methods such as Where, Select, Any, All and Sum.  Not only is it interesting to see what's going on, it'll help you to build better code using Linq.

Code Katas: Practicing your Craft

One of the key values as part of the Software Craftsmanship movement is to be "skill-centric" and as part of that, practicing our skills as software developers is key! The Code Kata format is a coding exercise that is repeated and perfected. It provides one of many ways to practice the craft of software development. We'll discuss the Code Kata format, introduce a few katas and discuss some other practice formats.

I will be guiding the Kata in C# (no previous knowledge necessary though). As this is hands on, to take full advantage of the session have Visual Studio or SharpDevelop installed, NUnit installed (or via NuGet) and an integrated unit test runner (recommend Resharper or NCrunch for VS).

Randori: Group Practice

Looking for a new way to practice your craft? Randori provides a complementary way type of training when compared with katas.

Elements of Randori are: Pair Programming, Pair changes with mechanism (Time box, Ping Pong), Start from scratch, Use TDD, Everyone should be following, Pair should be explaining, Audience gives suggestions only with when Green

An example is at http://vimeo.com/2499540 . This is a hands on session!