Tag Archives: conference

Upcoming Training in Indianapolis

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As we approach the end of 2012, it’s often a good time to think about budgets and goals for 2013.  I also know that sometimes, while doing this, we discover some leftover budget! If you happen to be one of those people with leftover budget that is considering some agile training in 2013, there are several GREAT opportunities coming up in the Indianapolis area I wanted to point out.  If you aren’t one of those lucky people, then maybe knowing about these opportunities will encourage you to try and get some more training money into your 2013 budget, or at least start spending what you did get in there early in the year before the standard cutback on training and travel budget that seems to occur mid year in many organizations.

Weekend Certified Scrum Master Trianing – January 19-20

Tom Mellor is holding a weekend CSM course in Indianapolis in January and asked me to co-train with him.  I’m extremely excited about this opportunity and hope to see lots of attendees eager to learn about agile there!  If you aren’t familiar with the CSM, this is really the introductory level certification offered by the Scrum Alliance.  Early bird rates are available until January 7th.  You can get more details by going here.

Agile Project Management: Do You Have What it Takes? – March 7

In conjunction with the AgileIndy Conference on March 8th, Johanna Rothman will be holding a one day workshop on Thursday, March 7th in Indianapolis.  This workshop is targeted at people that have been managing projects in traditional environments for a while.  Making the transition to agile can often be difficult and confusing when you have been used to working in more traditional project management methodologies.  This workshop will give individuals the chance to get some experience with a small practice project so you can begin to learn how to collect and analyze data in an agile environment.  You can get more information about and register for this tutorial through the AgileIndy Conference website.

AgileIndy Conference 2013 – March 8

There is also the AgileIndy Conference I am helping organize on Friday, March 8th in Indianapolis.  The speaker list is beginning to fill up and it is a very good lineup of content.  There will be topics focused on leadership and organizational change, technical practices, introduction to agile, and many other topics.  There will also be the great opportunities to network with other people in the area that may be experiencing some of the same things you are at work.  And don’t forget the opportunities to spend some one on one time with the speakers when they aren’t presenting!  Early bird pricing for the conference is just $99!  To get all the details and to register, head on over to the conference website!

Leadership Gift Workshop w/ Christopher Avery – April 18

After visiting Indianapolis as a keynote speaker for the AgileIndy Conference, Christopher is going to return to Indianapolis to hold his one day Leadership Gift Workshop on April 18th.  This is a very highly recommended workshop for anyone currently in or interested in leadership positions.  This workshop will help teach you how to be a great leader and coach, one that encourages people around him/her to take responsibility and demonstrate ownership.  This is not strictly agile or software related, it applies to any sort of leadership role.  You can get more information and register for the workshop by visiting the workshop website.  Currently, there is a great promotion going on offering 50% off to the first 10 tickets sold or until the end of the year.

So there are four different opportunities to learn and grow coming up in Indianapolis the first part of 2013!  I have heard rumors of others being scheduled as well, so it appears that 2013 will be a great year for increasing agility in Indianapolis!

Announcing the First AgileIndy Conference

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I realize I have been a bit quieter than normal on my blog the past few weeks.  I have fallen behind in keeping up with my usual RSS feeds and thus have been posting fewer links to interesting articles and have not had time to create any of my own.  Fortunately, there is good reason for this.  I have been hard at work at helping to organize the first AgileIndy Conference and I am pleased to announce the details of it here!

The AgileIndy Conference 2013 will happen on March 8, 2013, at The Marten House Hotel and Lilly Conference Center on the north side of Indianapolis.  It will be a one day, multi-track event that covers all aspects of software development. This conference will be focused on bringing thought leaders and practitioners from around the country to Indianapolis for an intense learning and networking experience. There will be a mix of sessions focused on agile basics, technical practices, and management and leadership topics among other things. If the planned sessions don’t interest you, there will be an open-space area where you can plan your own session and get other attendees and speakers to join you in your discussion! Whether you are completely new to agile or have been practicing agile for many years, there will be sessions here to help you along your agile journey!

I am happy to announce that both Christopher Avery and Johanna Rothman have been confirmed as speakers at the event and I am close to confirming several more.  While I greatly enjoy the regular AgileIndy monthly meetings, I have always loved the conference environment during which you get exposed to so many new ideas and new people.  It is quite an intense and exciting experience and I’m very excited to be bringing this experience to Indianapolis.  I am looking forward to a wonderful inaugural event and many more in the years to come!

If you would like to learn more about the event, check out the event website at http://www.agileindyconf.com.  You can get updates about the event by subscribing to the mailing list on the site or by going here.  You can also stay informed about the event by following the conference twitter account @agileindyconf.  If you want to get involved by volunteering, sponsoring the event, or if you are interested speaking at the event, just let me know by using my contact form.  Finally, one of the best ways you can support the effort is by registering and attending!  I’m looking forward to the event and hope to see you there!

re:build 2011

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Friday I had the chance to attend the re:build 2011 conference.  Being a native to the Indianapolis area, it was great to get a local conference for a change.  The conference was billed as “A Conference about building the Web” and was definitely a little more designer centric than most conferences I have attended in the past, but the speakers and content were great!

The conference started with Faruk Ate? talking about designing for the future of the web.  Faruk is one of the creators of the Modernizer library.  The main point of his talk was that you should design to give individuals with the most powerful browsers, making use of the latest technologies, the best experience possible on your site.  You can then use tools like Modernizer to detect when people are using your site with browsers that don’t support those newer technologies and handle those situations.  The main point here is that the content of your site should always be accessible no matter which browsers are being used…however we don’t need to constrain ourselves to the lowest common browser being used.  Just because a decent number of people hitting our site still use IE7 doesn’t mean that we can’t give people using the latest version of Firefox the best possible experience.  IE7 still needs to work an function in that case, they just may not get all the bells and whistles as someone running the latest version of Firefox.  An added benefit of this sort of design is that when you user upgrades his/her browser it will be like the site has been updated for them as well, but you didn’t have to do anything!

After Faruk, Leah Culver gave a great and inspiring talk on the Passion to Startup.  Leah’s presentation talked about her experience starting up Pownce, getting “acquired”, and then doing another startup, Convore.  She also talked a decent amount about some of the competitions she did (like Django Dash and Rails Rumble) and the model her and her team used for those competitions.  After listening to her talk I have no doubt she will be able to lead Convore out of the “trough of sorrow” and likely go on to startup more companies.

After Leah, Jan Cavan gave a talk about the process she goes through as a designer.  One of her biggest points was that you should involve the customer early and often.  When a customer hires a designer they are giving up some control.  If they aren’t involved during the process they may be likely to try and regain some of that control at the end by making lots of change requests.  However, if you involve them during the process and ask their opinion between certain choices, you give them back some of that control decreasing the chance for those revisions at the end of the process.  She also pointed out some of the tricks that I’m sure most designers probably know already but I found interesting like starting with low fidelity mock-ups without color to review with the client to ensure the client doesn’t get preoccupied with things like color choice and focuses on the problem at hand like overall layout and placement.

Next Neven Mrgan from Panic and Big Bucket Software gave an amazing presentation.  His talk was about the importance of doing things at two different levels of complexity.  He compared this to how Darwin spent years studying simple barnacles before writing On the Origin of Species.  He talked about his two jobs and how they provide this balance for him.  At Panic he is a designer of Mac software working on highly polished graphics, but at Big Bucket Software, he is a designer working on retro style games utilizing pixel graphics.  He also coined a great term “Furk” for combining Fun and Work!

Yehuda Katz definitely gave the most technical presentation of the day giving an overview of SproutCore focusing on the basics of their 2.0 version.  While I haven’t coded JavaScript in quite awhile, the value of a tool like this is definitely promising and I’ve found them interesting since I heard a podcast on a similar tool earlier in the year.  Basically these tools sit behind the scenes and work to keep your JavaScript data and the view in sync.  This allows you to write more declarative code (display the total of all the input boxes above here) as opposed to reactive (having to listen for changes on each of the input boxes and when any one changes go back through and recalculate the total).

Brad Colbow followed this up nicely with a discussion about how the little things matter.  His point was that you really should pay attention to all the little details because otherwise they can all add up to become a large problem.  He gave a great example of an attempt to check out a digital book from his local public library and the fact that he never ended up able to complete the task because lots of little details came up along the way.

Finally, Ethan Marcotte gave a talk on Responsive Web Design.  This was another amazing talk in which Ethan discussed designing your webpages to be responsive.  So instead of building a lot of different apps or different layouts for different types of devices, just make your website be responsive to the environment in which it is being viewed.  He pointed out that a good way to do this is to take more of a “mobile first” approach (how will this appear on a mobile phone) though in reality that is forcing you into a more “content first” approach.  You really have to think about what elements on the page are really important and which ones are just cruft.

As you can tell I enjoyed all of the content.  In addition to the focus of each individual talk, I also found it interesting how much all the presenters talked about agile without talking about agile!  Every single presenter talked about the need for less hand offs, more collaboration among the team, and frequent “releases” to the client to get feedback.  Obviously, being an agile guy, I thought it was wonderful to hear this undertone throughout the entire day.  It was a nice primer get me prepared for the week long Agile2011 conference next week!

It really was a great one day conference and I’m glad they were able to put it together in Indianapolis.  Thanks for all the hard work organizing and coordinating that!  I can’t wait for re:build 2012!