I’ve never attended CodeMash – this conference has one of the best reputations of any conference around. So I’m humbled to have been selected as a speaker, and excited to be here this week. This is a crazy good line up of people, the hardest part is all the people I want to go hear.. that are speaking the same time as me!

Thursday I’ll be speaking on Coding Naked – Unit testing those hard to reach places

This is a fun talk that has evolved over the last couple of years, and I really like hat it’s become. I go in to multiple scenarios that are challenging and give practical patterns and solutions for increasing your Unit Test coverage and effectiveness. (slides)

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On Friday I’ll be talking about ways to Prototype, Collaborate and Innovate

This talk dips in to several of the techniques and “lessons learned” that we used and discovered when I lead the product design (UX) team over at GetThere (Sabre). This is a great talk for UX people, developers and product owners. Basically – anyone that needs to work with other people and improve how you communicate ideas. (slides)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings”
– Todd Zaki-Warfel Author of the Prototyping book.

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If you’re around – please stop by and say hi! Also, stay tuned – this being my first year at CodeMash, I’m hoping to blog a little about each day just to capture my thoughts and takeaways.

See you there!

Image Credit:

AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Josh Holmes

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I know I’ve mentioned before how great it is to work for a company that provides time to attend and speak at various conferences. This is a whole next level.. Quicken Loans Technology group puts on their own annual conference that is truly a top notch 1 day conference. In addition to the speakers listed on the web site, I’ve also heard the likes of Steve Smith and Jim Holmes will also be presenting – I’m so pumped to be attending this! (and completely humbled to be presenting).

At QL Tech Conf I’ll be giving a UX’y talk

I’ll be sharing some of the lessons learned from when I ran the product design UX team at GetThere. We’ll be talking about how we used Innovation Games, rapid prototyping and design studios to better collaborate build better products. I really like the topics covered in this talk because they don’t just apply to UX teams. We’ve used Innovation Games to help facilitate retrospectives, organize team work and all sorts of contexts. I’ve found the prototyping techniques I’ll be covering useful whenever I need to communicate an idea or concept. Super handy for all dev and UX teams!

At MIGANG (Michigan Great lakes Area .NET Group) I’ll be speaking on Dependency Injection

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I love this talk. This is the talk I gave in Ft. Worth where someone commented “Had me laughing so hard I could hardly eat my nachos.” I went for nearly 10 years in my professional development career before I adopted a DI approach to authoring code… the techniques that I’ll be showing have had the single greatest impact on how I write software today. I’ve been giving this talk, in one form or another, for several years now. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by, we’ll hit up the local pizza place afterwards and have a great time!

Speaking in Israel

May 5, 2013    Category: Events, News   1 Comment »

This week I’ll be giving two talks and leading a workshop at the Sela Developer Practice in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

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I will be covering

I’m really excited about this conference, it’s the largest Microsoft Conference in Israel and so far is turning out great. I flew in earlier today, my host met me at the airport and drove me to the hotel where the conference will be at – awesome hospitality!

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As I write this I’m sitting at the hotel restaurant over looking the Mediterranean Sea eating my dinner. It’s amazing to be in a country that I’ve heard of my whole life and now am actually here. Awesome.

Update (Monday): Thanks for everyone that came to my “10 Reasons Software Sucks” session today – here are the slides!

Update (Tuesday): Had a great turn out for “Scaling Scrum” today, thanks for all of the great conversations and interaction. Here are the slides.
Also, a local presenter got sick yesterday, and so we added “Coding Naked – TDD on the edge” as a last minute addition – I hope that everyone that attended had as a much as I did! Here are those slides.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in my Software Craftsmanship workshop tomorrow!

See the rest of the photos..

Here are the slides from the presentation that Caleb gave at the North TX Silverlight User Group yesterday.

If you can make it to Tulsa next month, we’ll be there to hear Caleb give an enhanced version of this talk at the Tulsa Tech Fest on November 12th. This is the 5th year of the Tulsa Tech Fest – it’s always a packed event and a lot of fun. If you can make it, be sure to stop by and say hi!
We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

image It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog so I thought that I should catch everyone up to speed. I gave Six Flags my two week notice 3 weeks ago.. and started a new company last week. Someone asked me how long it took me to put together my new company, 20 years of hard work.  🙂

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Howard is moving to Texas.

May 7, 2007    Category: News   No Comments »

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I some how missed this even though he mentioned it almost a month ago. It looks like Michael Howard is going to move to the great Lone Star State, Austin specifically (to be near the Microsoft Technology Center). If you don’t know who Michael Howard is, he’s written some of the most definitive works around writing secure code. His book is called “Writing Secure Code” 🙂 I’ve heard him speak a couple of times, and it’s always a great experience… he really knows how to say things like they are and doesn’t pull and punches. Go read his blog and some of his other books while you’re at it. This is a great resource to have in our back yard! (I wonder if he’ll be open to speak at any of the local Code Camps?)

 

Welcome to Texas Michael!

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The International .NET Association of North America (INETA NorAm) recently had their elections. Their board of directors is made up of volunteers from through out the .NET community. These people donate their time and energies to help make INETA and .NET User groups from all over succeed.

I haven’t heard about all of the new officers, but I did just find out that David Walker from Tulsa is the new Vice President of the Speaker’s Bureau and that Darrell Hawley from Detroit is the new Vice President of Marketing. Josh Holmes and I were just talking about all of the great work that Darrell was doing in community. Darrell and I were actually nominated for the same board spot. I’ve never met Darrell in person, but we’ve spoken several times on the phone and he is definitely a top notch guy with a lot of energy and drive that he’s going to take to INETA. My hat’s off to him!

Woot! Congratulations all around!

Update #1: Congrats to Amanda for being the new President! I first met Amanda at TechEd 2005, and I’m glad to see how much she keeps contributing to the community!

Update #2: I’ll be meeting with David in the morning to give him his Zune, and to interview him about INETA, the new board. his recent trip to Seattle, running the Tulsa TechFest, CodeCamp, .NET User Group, Java User Group, he just had a baby (number 4) and oh yeah.. I think he works for IBM somewhere in the middle there. It should make for good CommunityCast.tv 🙂

 

CommunityCast goes live! Sort of.

February 20, 2007    Category: News   2 Comments »

CommunityCast.tv

CommunityCast TV is a project that I initiated right when I left Microsoft. The idea is to have informal interviews with people in the community. It sort of follows the format of Channel 9, except that Channel 9 is all focused on stuff that happens in Redmond, and we are focusing on everything else. It’s like Channel 9, for the rest of us! When I attend an event, I’m trying to focus on the event, rather than any single presenter, so I try to grab interviews with the presenters, organizers and attendees of events.

So far, we’ve interview people at the North Dallas .NET Users Group, BarCampDallas and the pre-BarCampDallas Pre-Mixer, the OKC Vista Launch, the Chicago Expression Launch and the DemoCampDallas.

Mr Media man and Pod Casting Extraordinaire himself, Giovanni Galluci, has posted the first two (pilot) episodes of CommunityCast.tv on a temporary holding spot off of Media Swamp.We’re still very early in the show development. We still don’t have an official logo and the sort of thing set up! We’ll have all of that set up soon enough.

Go check out the first two episodes, and then let me know what you like, what you’d like to see more of and what you’d like to see done differently! Also, we did a different intro song on the two episodes; I’d love to know what you think of the audio clips and which one you like best. Thanks! I’m looking forward to hearing back from everyone… and to seeing you out in the community!

Some of the places that we’ve been, and are going to soon:
This Month:

Next Month:

By the way, all 5 of these are in the same week! I’m going to have to catch up on sleep after that!

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