Where Am I In This Picture?

2 weeks ago I attended a very interesting 4 day seminar near Hamburg. The topic was about Participatory Leadership based on the Art of Hosting. I do enjoy going to events and un-conferences that are not in the center of what I’m busy with at the moment since a couple of years now. However, these events always were somehow related to my current activities. For this event I wasn’t 100% sure in advance if it’s close enough to my current fields of activities… and sometimes I already felt that I’m in enough communities already.

My doubts where completely without a reason. I started to plot my current fields of thinking and acting in the following coordinate system. This way I realized that the topic of this seminar and the community I joined fits perfectly to the journey I’m in since a couple of years. Even more, it was a missing link.

So far I tried to facilitate and organize open-spaces, world cafes and fishbowls being a self-educator. I saw the methods and techniques at agile and developer conferences I’ve attended, read some web and book material and applied what I learned that way as good as I could. That was an appropriate way to do it, but digging deeper about the why and how of facilitation techniques was an important experience.

And as I should see during this weekend, it was just the surface.

While knowing the methods and techniques is important it was impressive to see how much the little things when doing check-in/check-out, when having conversations etc. can make a big difference. It may take a long time of practice to come to this level. With every day I stepped deeper into the Art of Hosting I realized that this is a huge field to play in! Too much for a small SW dev guy! But my newly created coordinate system helped me to find clarity: It’s not my duty to be 100% in all of these playing fields, I need to find my personal blend out of these. And what became clear to me when speaking to a senior participant was that having multiple playing fields gives you the freedom to vary this blend over time – gives me an idea what could happen during my next decades…

I’m thankful for having the chance to meet with a group of passionate crazy-ones who all want to change their little world – being it a Swiss party, the education system in the Netherlands, the university of Hamburg or a media company. I came out stronger after these days. Stronger because I’ve learned something on the crafting level and stronger because I feel in good company with these people. We may not meet again, but I now feel connected to them.

After the seminar I was playing in the other fields again – I attended a Design Thinking talk, I joined an open-space of the SW craftsmenship community and listened to a talk of the .NET user group. Since a couple of days I’m in the planning phase for a department event together with a colleague, hoping to be able to apply some aspects of what I’ve learned from Art of Hosting. And I have some crazy ideas how to start in the field of organizational development – may need some more training but I’m looking forward to extend my playing field and find my very own blend.

What the Hell is PowerShell?

Had a very good week doing another PowerShell talk at .NET user groups in Mannheim, Bern and Luzern. Many thanks to Kai Simons, René Leupold and Daniel Marbach for inviting me to their user groups.

Giving talks at .NET user groups I experienced again that this is a very vivid community with a lot of smart people. I’m thankful to be a part of it since a couple of years.

Doing PowerShell talks in 2012 is specifically interesting. People obviously are more interested than before in PowerShell topics, I had a decent audience at all events. But very few do use PowerShell on a daily basis and not a hand full do write scripts/modules themselves.

Anyway, here are the slides and scripts I’ve used. I did not cover everything in the sessions, use them to learn and recap.

Stepping out of the Comfort Zone?

So far I attended a couple of unconferences that were somehow related to the technology stack I’m currently working in. This year I had the idea to step a bit out of my comfort zone. So I thought Socrates was an ideal chance to do that. But I must say – it wasn’t.

For a weekend I joined a very vivid community with like minded people where I felt comfortable from the very first moment. I focused a bit on topics that were more related towards the communication/collaboration aspects of our craft. I really enjoyed the sessions with Pierluigi Pugliese – got a lot out of it.

During the conference there were multiple talks about how to bootstrap a community around Software Craftsmenship. I think it should be a kind of bridging community across existing technology stack/practices communities. I wish we would do the following:

• Do coding dojos, retreats together to get to know other languages/frameworks/toolsets and how they support common practices (CCD, SOLID etc.)
• exchange community speakers across the groups to become more open minded in the existing groups.
• Do joint sessions of multiple groups for common interest topics, listening to ‚well known‘ speakers.

For a SW developer this was the best end summer event you can think of to get the needed motivation for coming fall project season. Thanks everyone!

Ah, I almost forgot: I also was a speaker at Socrates, speaking about the ‚forgotten customer‘.

The Forgotten Customer (Socrates 2011)

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.NET Open Space Karlsruhe was a Real Motivator

So far I attended 2 .NET Open Spaces in Leipzig and the 1 in Ulm. I did also attend multiple community conferences. And I must say: Again I got a full package of experience, motivation and a couple of ’navigation helpers‘ where to look into (technically). These kind of un-conferences really work exceptionally well!

• Topic Release Management: We had a session to share the Dos and Don’ts when doing product versions an patches. People in the session are facing similar issues as we see them in our company: Too less tool support, no common sense practices, too less attention on the whole topic. @lennybacon is doing some work in that area to bridge the gap that VC-systems, build servers etc. still keep open, I do really welcome that!

  Beside the tool aspect I could imagine that a Wiki sharing approaches and practices, listing Pros and Cons could help to come to a higher professionalism level in Release Management. There is a lot of noise and cloudy ads on the net, but do you know a resource that really helps to guide with the most basic things in Software Business?

• A lot of small talks and sessions were about the non technical aspects of doing software development – communication topics, project management topics and the psychological aspects of working together in a team. I got a lot out of it to use it in my daily life as an enterprise developer and as a (wannabe) change agent. It’s astonishing how open, experienced and inquisitive a group of nerds discusses these ‚meta‘ topics, a group that is seen as ‚autistic‘ sometimes. For the project management topic: I’m surprised again and again on developer conferences, how deep developers are in the field of agile methods, scrum and the like. Sometimes I would wish that I could say the same about the project manager group.
• @sforkmann gave an inspiring talk about CQRS using F#. Ok, I think F# will not be a topic for my project work for the foreseeable future. But each time I hear about CQRS I feel I understand a bit better, what it is, what it’s good for and – that I do it (partially wrong) since some time now. I really learned a lot in this session.

One last note about the community topic here: I really like to see a lot of known faces again on conferences like this, known from the net or personally. On the other hand: Could it be that it’s becoming a more and more closed club of 150..200 people hanging around together again and again? Could it be that topics like Ruby, node.js, monads (arbitrary terms here) keeps some people away? I wish these conferences could provide everything – a market place for advanced ideas, a place to attract new people and a place to build and grow the community.

See#Party 2010 – PowerShell for Developers – Material

I really enjoyed my session PowerShell for Developers at last weekend’s SeeSharpParty in Konstanz/Kreuzlingen. I did even more enjoy all the other sessions I attended during the day plus the talks with a lot of smart people.

Find the session material here.

Thanks again to all the helping hands and the .NET user group Konstanz-Kreuzlingen for making this party happen.

.NET Open Space Sued 2009 – the Spaceship took off

First of all: Excellent organization of the event – big THANK YOU to Thomas and Alex. Even vegetarian meals were covered 😉 ! Lot’s of interesting session discussions, floor discussions and evening discussions. Was really a pleasure (but exertive) to have that for a complete weekend with many competent peers.

Multiple sessions – „Schema-less DBs“ and „ORM“ – touched the relationship between .NET/OO/Client developers and database developers. I do observe that the data store is seen as a necessary evil when developing applications. My understanding is that it is more than a data tomb to dump some data in in a canonical manner. Multiple challenges we’re currently seeing in mainstream languages/environments – rich metadata, higher declarative tools to solve problems, resource management (CPU, Memory, IO), scalability, distributed topologies, parallelism, dealing with data in a set oriented manner – are solved in these database dinosaurs since decades. All in all a discussion that I would like to continue. It’s too important to use the right tool for the right job – even if 2 types of developers are involved. Finally: Did you know that database people (these inflexible guys with strange ideas…) do also discuss about topics like Agility and Refactoring?

A small session with 3, later 5 people was about „Getting things done„. A good part of the session the discussion circled around how to manage email traffic. Interesting enough as IMHO reading/writing emails is not the core competence of a software developer. We also touched Microblogging in the enterprise which triggered me to put that topic on the table again. How to manage blog reading etc. was another interesting part of the discussion. All in all a topic that could be continued in detail in a future Open Space as we all have to deal with information overload, information filtering and knowledge aggregation.

Some of my proposed topics „Administrative Toolsets“, The administrator as an additional further user“ didn’t find enough interest to be discussed. I must admit that ‚client‘ developers still don’t have these topics in their focus. But being able to provide manageable applications will be a key differentiator in the foreseeing future. Maybe these topics get a higher priority in future Open Spaces. I should be better prepared to talk about experiences I made, to come up with best practices, to propose the usage of frameworks and tools.

Still struggling if I should attend the next .NET Open Space in Leipzig, think I should…