Upcoming Speaking Events

As is normal for me this time of year, I’ve got a number of events that I’m attending to do a little speaking and a little learning. This round will take me to three states, but only one time zone (thank goodness).

Indy Tech Fest, May 22

I’ll be presenting on Lean Software Practices. We’ll go through the seven principles of Lean Software Development, and I’ll present some experiences with each as I’ve practiced Lean over the last few years.

Indy Tech Fest might not be too familiar to us here in central Ohio, because it’s outside our MS region. (gasp) But, the folks in Indy do a bang up job with their events, and they have a large, active .Net community. This is my second year venturing west to join the folks at Indy, and it was a great time last year.

The Path to Agility, May 27

This is the first Path to Agility conference, and it’s being put on by the Central Ohio Agile Alliance at the Arena Grand theater in the Arena District of downtown Columbus. They’re bringing in Ken Schwaber to keynote the event, so I am most decidedly on the undercard.

I’ll be presenting my Kanban experiences over the last few years. It’ll introduce Kanban and how to use it to deliver software. I’ll relay the good experiences and the bad experiences.

There is quite a line up for this conference, and there’s still space available. If you can get a Thursday off work, it’ll well worth the $100 to attend. There are some top notch local agile people presenting. (The Clippers are at home that night, stick around for some baseball.)

Central Ohio Day of .Net, June 5

The “home” event. Can’t miss this one, it’s a great time every year.  Getting the Cincy, Dayton, and Columbus folks under the same roof has made for a great event the last two years.

I’ve been selected to give two talks this year. Upside, I’m giving two talks. Downside, it’ll cut into my hallway sessions.

The schedule isn’t out yet, so I don’t know which session fits where. I’m presenting a beginning IronRuby talk, where we’ll get it installed, bang out some ruby code, hit a few CLR objects, and possibly take a few whacks at a piñata to bring the fun level down a little. The second talk will be the same Lean presentation I’m giving in Indy.

Codestock, June 25-26

My second trip to Knoxville to get in on Codestock. This is a great event. It’s got .Net roots, but offers quite a bit outside the normal .Net conference sessions. There are a lot of choices to make on what to attend over the two days. They did move to downtown Knoxville this year, so I’m looking forward to the new venue.

I’m speaking twice here, as well. I’ll deliver a Kanban talk, and an IronRuby talk. The IronRuby talk is going to go a bit deeper on testing than the one I’m giving at CODODN.

An added benefit to Codestock is Wendy and the boys go along, and we turn it into a mini-vacation. So, I’ll get a little pool time in, which usually doesn’t happen at conferences not named “Codemash.”

Ohio User Group Tour, July 22, 27, 28

We’re going to IronRuby it up at the Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton user groups in July. This talk is going to go into testing our C# code with IronRuby, and what advantages there are to this. The reason the CODODN talk is the beginning talk is because I was scheduled talk for these user groups back in December. Since it’s roughly the same crowd, we’ll do the intro at Day of .Net and dive into the testing at the local user groups.

Expect to see some RSpec running against C#, Rails running on IronRuby, Sinatra running on IronRuby, and mabye we’ll get crazy and put a Rails front end on an nHibernate repository or something. All hell’s gonna break loose during this one!

If I survive all this, I’ll have like 3 weeks of summer to kick back and relax…

CodeStock Recap and Kanban Talk Slides

I had a great time at Codestock this past weekend. I didn’t get to many sessions, but I did go to a number of open space sessions (have some work to do on my blog) and the normal “hallway” sessions that never disappoint.

My talk on Lean and Kanban went really well. There were only a couple seats left in the smallish room we had, but that lead to a much more interactive discussion. The slides are available to download, with some notes in the deck.

To answer a couple more questions from the group, here are a couple of the resources I mentioned in the talk:

• Core Ladas blog: http://leansoftwareengineering.com/
• Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Coming soon will be Agile Zen. I’ve taken a peek at the beta, and it’ll be quite a tool in helping people and teams do lean development. Sign up for their mailing list to get notified when it comes out.

Now Batting Leadoff for CodeStock…

I am honored to have been selected to speak at CodeStock and will be delivering having my Kanban conversation in the great state of Tennessee. I’m really looking forward to this as I didn’t make CodeStock last summer, and it looks like a great two day event. The good folks that have organized the conference have slotted me in one of the opening sessions on Friday, so we’ll get our Lean on early in the conference.

There are a number of sessions I’m looking forward to, and since mine is over early I should get to a bunch of them. But, as with any regional conference, I’m looking forward to the hallway sessions as well.

If you’re thinking about going, go get registered, it looks like it’s going to be a good time.