Tag Archive for 'conferences'

Spring conferences

Published on January 20, 2012 in people & systems. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Devnology Community Day, Saturday February 4, Baarn, Netherlands

Keeping with my plan to do more shorter, local conferences and not keeping with my plan to avoid weekend conferences, I’ll be hosting Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne’s eXtreme Startup at the Devnology Community Day

devnology participants in a circle with laptops and tablets
It was great fun to run it at last years’ XP Days Benelux. It’s always amazing to see how focusing on incoming feature requests lets you easily forget the big picture.
Participants at Devnology should have at least as much frustration ;) So bring your laptop or pair up with someone and join the fun. The only
thing you need is your favorite programming environment and a way to respond to HTTP requests.

FOSDEM – Sunday February 5, Brussels, Belgium

If you break a plan, do it in style. So I’ll also be doing something on the Sunday. Stephan Eggermont has arranged a Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM

We’ll probably be doing a longer version of Back to the Future, (Re)Learn Smalltalk like we did at the SPA Conference last year.

To keep my sustainable pace, I’ll just move my weekend to the Monday and Tuesday after these conferences. We’ll see how that works out.

Mini XP Days Benelux – Monday April 23, Heeze, Netherlands

Keeping up with the two main session themes of last year, smalltalk and configuration management, Stephan Eggermont and yours truly will rerun our session on getting started with Chef and Puppet at mini XP Days Benelux, the full program is yet to be announced.

Rob Westgeest kindly championed our session, as he assumed we learnt from the feedback from the previous session. The lego-themed slides were well received, but we could have focused the introductory stories more on one or two complete examples, as opposed to telling a bunch of benefits related to things we’ve done. The same went more or less for the code samples. It wasn’t clear to all participants how the ‘big picture’ fit together, so we’ll see if we can visualize that.

I look forward to seeing you at one of these conferences!

Extreme Startup, Smalltalk and Server Login Considered Harmful at XP Days Benelux

Published on November 25, 2011 in people & systems. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

What do Extreme Startup, Smalltalk and Server Login Considered Harmful have in common?

I’ve made some slides to promote sessions about them at XP Days Benelux. Competition for the most hilarious Official Half Minute Pitch at each half day of the conference is fierce. This year sessionorganisers can send in slides. Luckily Stephan Eggermont reminded me that the deadline is right about now. With a few iterations, film poster-like slides are my themes for this year.

When Robert Chatley asked if I wanted to be stand-in for Matt Wynne, who has more sensible priorities than most of us ;) I thought for half a minute and said yes. The eXtreme Startup is a hands-on session that lasts a morning, but allows for new participants halfway through. I attended it at Agile Cambridge, and found it loads of fun and educational. Can you and your partner code against the market and your competitors? Will you deliver the most business value against changing demand? Can you balance the flow of euros against technical debt? Join us this friday at 9:30 in room 16 and find out.

One of the ways to iterate quickly while finding out what is a good market fit, is to use a language and environment that was build to explore the unknown. Join Stephan Eggermont and yours truly this Friday at 16:30 in Room 16 and find out how web development can be like desktop GUI development, and how Debugger Driven Development optimizes your inner software development loop! No code was harmed in the making of this session.

So, you’ve found your strategy to find your market and keep up with it and you’ve found a development sweet spot. Now your deployments can’t keep up. Servers burn down, your mail is a spam magnet and as a systems administrator you are getting tired of late night phone calls. Devops configuration management to the rescue? Come to our session “Server Login Considered Harmful” and find out if Chef can save your Puppet’s bacon. Find out this Thursday at 11:00, again – surprise surprise? – in Room 16.

XP Days Benelux is already sold out, I just wanted to share the fun Ihad in preparing it. Still hoping to see you there :) .

on/off the road :)

Published on August 26, 2008 in public courses. Closed Tags: , , .

With the holiday season almost ending it is time to make plans for the rest of the year. Summer was enjoyable; After Marc and I went to the ESSAP summer school in Varese, we drove to Luzern, Switzerland for the first, and very succesful, in-house run of the Unit Testing Masterclass. Marc, Rob and I learnt a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) in our courses in the first half of this year, and it was very satisfying to see it come together… when we experiment it does’nt always, of course – the price of a little courage. I took two full weeks of holiday – highly recommended to you (yes you!), my fellow workaholics. Then on to agile2008 in Toronto, which I took as a sort of extended holiday, swimming everyday, chatting with people, the occasional session, and my last meetings as a member of the agile alliance board – I want to focus more on my business and travel less between timezones if it’s not business. And then a small roadtrip afterwards.

Now I’m ‘not travelling’ – visiting my girfriend in Bath, while working remotely, and meeting some people in London at the eXtreme Tuesday Club tonight.

I’m busy brainstorming some new training courses, and turning the spike of a customer relationship management system for eXperience Agile (soon to be relaunched under a different name, watch this space :) ) into something that is tested and ready for production. With Emmanuel Gaillot we’re translating eXperience Refactoring into “des excursions dans le rémaniement continu”, which we’ll do in-house in September, and hope to do an open enrollment one in Paris in October. In the Netherlands we’re planning to do some more open enrollment courses:

And 29 October I’ll be presenting “right sizing your unit tests” (a taster session for our Unit Testing Masterclass) with Marc at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. I’ll probably also be running a session (wich one to be decided yet) at Xp Days Benelux November 20 & 21 in my hometown of Eindhoven and then later on enjoying the open space at XpDay London, 11th & 12th December.

And of course I’m planning to make more plans and blogging to make more blogs ;)