the ‘bee log

This’ll be redundant for a lot of people but I’ve picked this blog up and moved it over to CodeBetter.

Note that my RSS feed hasn’t changed (more on how I managed that later) so this announcement is really for friends, enemies, frenimies, and lost Googlers that come to laribee.com or thebeelog.com straight up.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program!

I love this term: human amplification. I believe (but can’t find confirmation) that it comes from the U.S. Navy.

You know the idea. The Agile realm re-imagines the traditional manager as a sort of human amplifier. Let’s consider Scrum. One of the named roles in Scrum is the Scrum Master. It is the Scrum Master’s responsibility (among other things) to remove obstacles revealed by the team.

To be amplified you’ve got to leave yourself open to amplification. In our world - where we don’t have DARPA, Super-sonic Jets, or 30mm Cannon - this means responding to criticism. Learn how to take criticism, and don’t be afraid to get to the heart of the matter. Courage is one of the core XP values for a reason.

After a fairly slow end-of-August, I’m kicking it into overdrive with the whole community involvement routine. If you aren’t sick of me by now, well friends, my antics this October and November should do the trick. Here’s the rundown:

Oct 3 | Syracuse, NY | Syracuse .NET Developer’s Group

Rik Bardrof and I will be doing a spruced up variant of the You Got Served: Ping-Pong Pairing talk that covers TDD, DDD, and Ping Pong Pairing. If you’re in the cold north, you should try to make it. Rik, for the unaware, is a blogless developer who works with me at Xclaim. We should get a lot of opportunity to talk about some of the techniques we use in the wild.

Oct 5-7 | Austin, TX | ALT.NET Open Spaces Conference

The event of the year, IMHO. While not a speaking engagement (it’s more an invitation to a conversation, wait…) the event will be a great opportunity to meet many people with at least one foot in the .NET developer world. The event is in the Open Spaces style so I’ll pitch a few sessions and see how they’re received. In any case, I’m not going to bring stand-and-deliver sessions to this happening; I expect lots of conversation/debate/back-and-forth!

Oct 8-9 | Boston, MA | ReMIX

Giving a talk called Language Mashups with the DLR (it’s billed wrong on the site). Why would you use Javascript, Ruby, C#, Python, and friends all in the same application? What’s the DLR? How’s it work? What does stepping outside of the mono-langauge world do for you? Join me in Boston and find out.

Oct 12-13 | Nashville, TN | devLink

I’m speaking about the juicy goodness that is Domain-Driven Design and NHibernate. I’ve done this talk a few times now, so I’m retooling it going in to Music City USA. Should be a good time!

Oct 19-20 | Tulsa, OK, | Tulsa TechFest 2007

Enter the Ping-Pong Programming House of Pain with me and coconspirator Ray Lewallen. This session is so free-form, high participation, and different every time. We start with a model (DDD) and let it go from there. Hopefully we’ll be able to work in some developers from the peanut gallery like we did in OKC.

Nov 25-29 | Vancouver, BC, CA | DevTeach

Doing a number of talks here (DDD, User Stories, Agile Panel, check the site). There are a number of excellent speakers on the roster, so I’m not only honored to be speaking, but jazzed up to be able to attend sessions by such folks as Jeremy Miller, JP Boodhoo, Ayende Rahien, James Kovacs, Scott Bellware, etc. I’m also glad to finally see Vancouver; I hear it’s the kind of city you can immediately picture living in.

If you’re coming out to one or more of these events let’s meet up! To me, that’s the main value of doing this - meeting a number of interesting, new people and catching up with those I’ve already met on the road.