Like Inbox Zero, I'm trying to play catch up before the year starts! I like to keep a record of when I speak at places, as a nice reminder for me to look back on, and to promote events before they come up. I'm really working to stay more up to date, but honestly - over the last couple of years, I find that I've mostly been posting to LinkedIn and have been neglecting my own space. I often think about these walled gardens, as my friend Scott has said "Blog is the engine of your community" and "Why you need your own blog".  If you're following along and are already caught up on jobs - then let's jump into speaking events!

I spoke at QL Tech Con 2018 in Detroit in person

I’ve spoken about the Detroit Tech Con in the past. It’s a massive internal conference that Quicken Loans hosts every year., They take over Detroit’s largest convention center, bring in external speakers – it’s always a great event. If you ever get a chance to present or attend, I highly recommend it. This was my second time presenting. This time I was on an “agile panel” with a number of other technologists – both internal and external. It was a great time.

I spent 3 years commuting to Detroit – not just for Tech Con, check out rest of the photos!

IT Dev Connections in Dallas – Oct 15-18, 2018 in person

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I spoke on “Code to DI For” and patterns for “Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise“. One of the highlights of this conference was that we were in downtown Dallas, and my second oldest daughter got to come hang out with me for the week. We discovered the electric scooters that we

Dallas DNUG – June 13th, 2019 in person

The Dallas DNUG is one of the longest running .NET User groups in the country! Even during the pandemic, they continued to be active – moving their meetings to an online format. I spoke on 10 Reasons your software sucks.. I’m grateful to their leadership team, friends I’ve known since 2005! They continue to invest and grow this critical group.

DFW QA Association – June 16th, 2020 – on line

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One of the QA people at Solera connected me with the DFW QA Association, and I was able to present (online) at one of their sessions. I covered 10 Reasons your software sucks – a focus on 10 engineering practices every professional development team should grow in. I love finding pockets of communities and areas that I hadn’t connected with before!

Capital One’s Beyond DFW Conference – Nov 18th, 2019 in person

The awesome Marty Cagan gave a great keynote. It was great meeting him and I loved his way of thinking about product design and innovation. It’s definitely worth checking out his book. I was also able to bring my oldest daughter to attend the sessions – what a great experience for her! I’m grateful for my friend Stephen P. Anderson for inviting me to speak and letting me talk about 10 Power Ups for Scrum. Additional photos from that day.

DBU’s Tech Talks and DBU guest lecturer (twice), in person & on-line

I’m a big fan of the dual Master’s (MSITM) degree program that Sharon and his team have put together over at DBU. He frequently brings in external speakers from the industry so that his students leave with a solid foundation of the world they are stepping in to … not just academic theory.

Over the summer (pre-covid… in the before times) Sharon hosted a number of TechTalks at their Plano campus, open to the public. This was one of my last in person events (Feb 20th, 2020) before everything was shut down due to COVID. The two guest lectures I gave were both over Zoom. For the in person session, I gave 10 Power Ups for Scrum, my two online (July 29, 2020 & April 14th, 2021) talks focused on the same topic “Process Wont Save You” – that is, while various agile processes (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, etc) each have their own strengths and purposes – to really get the agile benefits, they work best with agile engineering practices … TDD/BDD, CI/CD, SOLID Principles etc.. they all work synergistically together! Photos from the DBU TechTalk

Unlimited Agile Conference – Nov 4th, 2021 on-line

I was honored to be included as one of the presenters at the first annual Unlimited Agility Conferences. I was able to cover 10 Power Ups for Scrum. Organized by my friends Derek Lane and David Koontz are putting together quite a community (free to join) and regular on-line events to help grow your agility. Go check it out!

Wow.. that’s a lot of talks that I missed, here are 5 more that I’ve already blogged on:

I’ll be at Code Stock in April 2020


Code Stock was canceled that year – a casualty of the pandemic. I had planned on speaking on Scrum, and was also scheduled to speak on an agile “debate” panel. This was going to be my first time at Code Stock – my wife and I were really looking forward to being there and exploring Knoxville, TN!

Here’s to 2022 being even brighter than the last two years!

I’ll be presenting on “Scrum from the trenches – 10 Power Ups that work!” – this is a fun talk that digs into some areas that aren’t always obvious right away. Scrum is incomplete *by design* – these of some of the Scrum practices that I’ve found helpful over and over again in the last many years. As a technology leader, consultant and agile coach.
Slides

DFW Beyond is one of the Summit conferences that Capital One in Plano has been organizing. I’m really excited to attend and participate in a full day of great speakers. Like many conferences I speak at – one of the hardest parts is all of the great sessions and speakers that are on at the same time as me. Check out the schedule, register – and hope to see you there!

Dallas Tech Fest this Friday!

June 2, 2017    Category: Events   No Comments »

This Friday I’ll be speaking at the Dallas Tech Fest.
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My talk is called “Coding Naked – Unit Testing those hard to reach places!” – it’s all about better unit testing and strategies for tackling some of those not so obvious scenarios.

Hope you can make it!

I’ll be posting the updates to my slides here shortly after the conference.

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Later this month, I’ll be speaking at the DFW Scrum – Technical Edition meetup in Dallas, TX. They meet at Improving Enterprises (some really nice new offices!) Come check it out! If you’ve seen this talk before, this is updated for 2017 and is much more focused on strategies for unit testing those hard to reach places. We’ll look at working with Mocks, Dependency Injection – and look at some strategies for testing statics and extension methods.

Here is the “official description”:

Code coverage with quality unit tests are your first line of defense to reducing technical debt, increasing code quality and accelerating your ability to change and adapt code (without breaking it) while continuing to add new features. Most TDD sessions focus on the easy to test areas of your code base that are almost never what you experience getting back to your desk. Come learn why TDD is not a fancy practice for the coding elite, but an understandable, obtainable and practical approach to delivering value for every developer, and how, when done properly, will increase communication and design between the business stake holders and developers.

We will focus on practical steps to moving towards & embracing TDD. We’ll overview the normal roadblocks that people typically run in to, and practical coding strategies to overcome those road blocks on your way to embracing a Test Driven Development lifestyle – make coding without tests as uncomfortable as coding (or camping) naked! From the author of Automated Unit Tests chapter in the Wrox Book “Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight – Indispensable Experience from 15 MVPs, we will learn:

  • Distinguish between the 4 major elements of automated unit tests. Code, Tests, Testing Framework and Test Runners and how they interact with each other to round out your engineering practices.
  • Discover how Mocking Frameworks and DI make your tests easier to read and write in everyday life.
  • Dig in to better ways to write and organize your tests so that they communicate intent, document your code for you and bridge the gap between development and business needs.
  • We’ll take a more specific look at those “hard to reach” places like the edges of your code, extension methods and other interesting scenarios

* everyone will leave their cloths on – it’s not that kind of talk!

I recently gave this talk at the internal Software Craftsmanship community for Quicken Loans in Detroit – and we all had a great time. If you’re not in Dallas, this is one of the talks I’ll be giving at Detroit Code in July.

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Thursday April, 14th, I’ll be speaking at the Dallas .NET User Group.

This talk introduces the concepts of factories, strategy pattern, Inversion of Control, dependency injection and several of the available frameworks.  We’ll also look at common dependency injection patterns and various IoC/DI frameworks, the pros & cons, practical steps and guidance as well some of the real world scenarios with impact to unit testing and application architecture.

The single greatest thing that you can do to make your code more testable and healthy is to start taking a Dependency Injection approach to writing software

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–Real World .NET, C# and Silverlight
Wrox Press 2012

I gave this talk last month at the Ft. Worth .NET User Group, and this was one of my favorite comments from there:

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If you’d like a preview, here are the slides on Slideshare, and the demo code on Github.

Be sure to RSVP – Hope to see you there!

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Slides:  http://www.slideshare.net/calebjenkins/prototype-collaborate-innovate

 

This is one of my favorite talks.

I first gave it at the Big Design Conference last year, and then at the Tulsa Tech Fest this year. Come learn about how we used Innovation Games, Sketching and Prototyping to collaborate with our customers to create awesome products when I was the UX product design manager at GetThere.

I’ll be touching on techniques from the Protyping Book, Innovation Games and using Microsoft PowerPoint and Indigo Studio from Infragistics to rapidly prototype ideas.

I’m excited to give this talk again – I presented at the last two Dallas TechFest events.

  • I was excited to see this conference come back!
  • more excited to be invited to present (awesome)
  • and even more excited that Jared Spool will be delivering the opening key note (even more awesomer!!).
  • You could say I’m pretty excited. Smile

Apparently I’m not the only one.

According to the Dallas TechFest twitter account – they completely sold out this week!

 

If you haven’t picked up Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book and the Innovation Games book you’ll get the meat that I had to leave out of my short talk.

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I hope to see you there tomorrow, find me and say “hi”  – let’s talk about all things Agile, UX, .NET and have a great time.

Enjoy!

If you’ve been following my tweets lately (protip: you should be Winking smile ) , you might have noticed that I’ve been retweeting about the next Hack event in Dallas, the Windows Kinect Hack Event. Follow the live tweet from this event with the Hashtag #iDevThis

 

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What is Windows Kinect?

Well, it’s a lot like the Kinect device for XboxOne, only it’s designed to be used by Windows applications.

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I’m really excited about this event for a couple of reasons.

  1. I was asked to be Judge – Awesome. I’m not really a judgmental person per se.. but this should be fun. I have a hard time thinking of ideas that would be uniquely suited for Windows, as apposed to generalized games that are equally suited for XBox and Windows. I’m excited to see the ideas that come out of this event and the development that happens.
  2. Developer events like this are a lot of fun, you meet some neat people and usually have a fun time learning together. (community FTW!)
  3. My son is going with me. While Noah hasn’t done a lot of coding, he recently got turned on to game development with Unity and so I’m excited to see what he thinks of developing apps for the Kinect.
  4. It’s at the DEC. I’ve heard this is a great venue – and it is!! Also, my friend Jennifer help start the DEC a while ago and I just haven’t had an opportunity to get over here yet.

Update: Packed House!!

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Judging doesn’t start until around 7pm on Saturday, so even if you haven’t participated in the event – I think you can still swing by and check out all of the work that was done.

See you there!

Update: Read Jason’s (Microsoft’s Technical Evangelist) overview of the whole event. From his post..

15 teams presented their projects on Saturday night in front of the judging panel. The projects ranged from scanning your body measurements, detecting head nods for paraplegics on into video games and educational apps. The ideas, innovation and level of execution on these projects was nothing short of amazing and mind-blowing. I could tell by how long it took the judges to come out with the results, that their job was indeed difficult in choosing the winners.

I couldn’t agree more!

Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise

April 9, 2013    Category: Events   1 Comment »

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of presenting “Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise” at the North Dallas .NET Users Group.

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This is one of my favorite talks lately, for anyone doing Scrum, especially in heavily matrixed organizations where you have enterprise level people working across multiple teams and don’t seem to fill well in the 3 roles defined by “out of the box” Scrum.. then this talk for you. Here is the description:

Scrum is the most popular Agile framework in the world for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation. Scrum is optimized for teams for teams of 5 to 9 people. Making Scrum work with larger teams or in large enterprise environments brings its own set of challenges. This talk presents 3 patterns used on enterprise teams to scale Scrum effectively with global teams.

If you were able to attend, I would sure love to hear your feedback. Thanks!

Workshop Agile + UX

November 12, 2011    Category: Events   No Comments »

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Big Design Week starts Monday, and we’re thrilled to announce that our own Caleb Jenkins has been asked to help present on Wednesday’s workshop! He’ll be digging in to the dicey topic of UX and Agile with Brian Sullivan and Jim Carlsen-Landy. We’re looking forward to hearing how these three present together. They all come at Agile and UX teams from slightly different angles. Jim has managed UX teams for a couple of years at a company that was an early adopter of agile practices, and Brian will be walking through hands on techniques to get scrappy with your UX research, design and deliverables.

Caleb will be focusing in on some of the misconceptions that exists between the agile and UX worlds and specifically how teams can scale Scrum with UX teams. It’s going to be awesome! Check out the full week’s schedule, and if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time to register.

See you there!

UX + Agile

May 13, 2011    Category: Blog   No Comments »

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Jared Spool published a great article yesterday titled “Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams”.

Jared talks briefly about proliferation of agile approaches in software design and user experience (UX) design and contrasts that to the Big Design Up Front approaches of the past, he then goes further in describing, not only User Stories, but several other layers of UX design and how each layer differs in scope and purpose from the other layers.

we frequently saw the successful teams talking about these other layers all through development. When a team member would produce a deliverable or design sketch that wasn’t quite matching the direction that the other team members imagined, the team would step back and talk about the other layers, trying to figure out where the disconnect came from. Because the team established the layers together, based on research they jointly conducted, they found it easy to collaborate on creating coherent experiences that regularly delighted their users.

It’s a great read, and I highly recommend heading over to the UIE site and reading the full article. You might also consider subscribing to the UIE podcast BrainSparks.

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If you’ve never heard Jared Spool speak live, he’s a great presenter and is always thought provoking and memorable, our chief mentor will be presenting at the same conference as Jared in July, The Big (D)esign Conference is July 14th – 16th – Hope to see you there!

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