Are Ruby conferences taking us in the wrong direction?

I just got back from Baruco. I had a wonderful time, made new friends and caught up with some old ones. but I was still left with a concern. That’s what this post is about. The whole event felt very professional and well-run. Many of the speakers were people who I recognised or knew from […]

A coding dojo story

It was 2008, and I was at the CITCON conference in Amsterdam. I’d only started going to conferences that year, and was feeling as intimidated as I was inspired by the depth of experience in the people I was meeting. It seemed like everyone at CITCON had written a book, their own mocking framework, or […]

A Puzzle for Polite Ruby Programmers

I really enjoyed Jim Weirich’s session on polite programming at the Scottish Ruby Conference. He covered a problem that’s been vexing me for some time, about avoiding the use of method aliasing, by using inheritance instead. Unfortunately, his suggested solution didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already tried. I still think this must be possible, […]

Battling Robots at Software Craftsmanship 2010

I’ve submitted a session for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 Conference. It’s a redux of the Robot Tournament I ran at SPA2010. The idea behind the session is to simulate the life of a start-up software company. In the early rounds of the tournament, the priority for each team is to get a robot, any robot, […]

Random Notes from SPA2010

Usage-Centric Design Narrative Journey Maps Duncan Prefers the term Usage-Centred Design to User-Centric Design. There was a book reference here but I missed it. Narrative Journey Maps (NJM) are a way to model and visualise the steps a user has to follow as they try to achieve a goal. Each Step is decorated with: Comments […]

Personas for Debugging Pair Programming Session

As I may have mentioned I’m running a session at Agile 2009 called ‘Debugging Pair Programming’. There’s a preview of the session tomorrow night at Skills Matter and I’ve just finished preparing for it. Mind if I run a couple of things past you?

XP Day 2007

…was good fun, and well worth a couple of days off. There’s a mixed crowd – some die-hard extreme programmers, quite a few self-styled (and self-promoting!) ‘coaches’ and a few newbies. The atmosphere was really friendly – you would quite often find yourself sat in one session right next to the person who had been […]