ten years of XTC

Friday, August 14th, 2009

London’s eXtreme Tuesday Club celebrated it’s ten year anniversary last tuesday. Unfortunately I could not be there, so I’m celebrating here, beer in hand, as one should – I find the weekly meetings in a pub with eXtremely interesting folks and the conferences (XP Days) that are organized around it refreshing.

Refreshing

Refreshing by Louise Docker

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new new Newsletter

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

A newsletter is much like software – if you create a larger batch of items, the work grows more than linearly (editing, translating, scrolling, selecting). It’s still worth it though – creating the newsletter on a regular basis helps to reflect on what we’ve done, but also creates focus: what are we going to do or research to make the next one interesting…. The positive response we’ve gotten so far also helps. Marc was kind enough to create a wordle to reveal more of the content:

QWAN newsletter topics, according to wordle

QWAN newsletter topics, according to wordle

Maybe because of the delay (we skipped May eventually) we not only have more items, they are also longer. We try to keep the newsletter short, but the things we discussed at conferences and while making the product development training gave us some inspiration to explain some topics in more detail. If the topics pique your interest, you can read it online or subscribe.

xp2009 beach photos

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

One of the things that made the xp2009 conference exceed my expectations was the beach. Here you can see photos from thursday, May 28th – Patrick Kua hosted an Open Space session on ” is there a lean versus agile versus kanban divide?” that turned into one of the best sessions of the conference. The guys from agical organized an unplanned barbecue, which was great; most participants were there, and the hotel management was very supportive.

I’ll process and post the rest of the photos when time permits – I decided not to do everything in a big batch this time ;) (which sometimes means the batch never gets executed and photos are not published). Tomorrow Marc and I depart to Luzern, Switzerland for the first instance of our Agile Product Development training, so there is not much time left.

Haskell dojo at eXtreme Tuesday Club London

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Mike Hill and me will be co-hosting a haskell coding dojo at the eXtreme Tuesday Club in London this tuesday.  Prior experience of Haskell not required, just bring your intention to have some fun :) A dojo is a great way of learning together, and I see we have at least one participant with quite a bit of haskell experience; so register to join the fun…

Got to France

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

So I got to xp day france, on thursday and friday.
Cedric Girard presenting
it’s cool to see people get together, share experiences, try out new ways of presenting and simply connecting.

All of the sessions were in French. It was cool to see an american (Charlie Poole) and a canadian (J.B. Rainsberger) do presentations in French :

charlie poole presenting in french

The thursday night dinner / boat trip was also very nice.

dinner on the seine

dinner on the seine 2

To introduce the sessions, all presenters did one minute presentations, which worked very well to warm up the audience.

one minute presentation

I co-facilitated a run of Simple tools for communication (‘des outils simple pour le communication’) with Marc Evers again (also known as Balancing Act), this time supported by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot, who helped us out with translating to French, doing roleplays and facilitation.

blaming

We scaled this workshop in several dimensions. Doing it in French was more difficult than doing it in English or German, turnout was the largest we had so far for this workshop (between 25 and 30 people). As it requires quite a bit of facilitation and safety, we are very careful not to scale it too quickly.

people standing in a circle

We did exercises and demonstrations about coping stances, self other and context, the satir change model, and as a roundup we did a temperature reading. Near the end, the audience was pretty much exhausted. Judging from the reactions, the laughs, and the stories participants roleplayed, the workshop was a success.
pass the ball

I haven’t much to say about it right now, still recovering from excellent dinners, wine, conversation and enjoyable sessions. And I’m preparing for the next workshop, this afternoon I’m co-hosting the ‘these are just some of my favorite tools’ workshop at SPA with Marc Evers and Emmanuel Gaillot. I hope the pictures speak for themselves.