Crystal Clear

I just finished up Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockburn. A very good book, but it was a stretch to get it to 300 pages. The first chapter threw me for a loop the way it was structured and the last chapter, a case study, was a dud. While the team size for Crystal should be 8 or less, a case study with 1.5 developers doesn't sound like a very good case study. However, the chapters in between were excellent. Cockburn admittedly structured each chapter differently attempting to cater to different readers. It gave me some insights into how a successful team should interact and was very complementary to the other Agile documentation that I've seen. I definitely liked his guidance on Walking Skeleton and Incremental Re-architecture. It helped me reinforce the concept of an Architectural Slice that I've been conveying to the folks on the large Java project that I'm currently working on.

Kudos to Andy Miller for recommending this book!

Shipped It!

Jared Richardson of Ship It! fame spoke at the TCJUG on Monday. His topic was your career. He started out a bit slow, but the pace picked up as his presentation progressed. I think most folks got quite a bit out of it, but it reminded me of several presentations I had seen before. Particularly there was some overlap with a presentation I went to several years ago by Dave Thomas at NFJS Denver. Dave's theme was about investing in your career. That was the first time I heard Dave's infamous "Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep".

I did learn some new stuff at Jared's presentation. In particular I learned about qik, which looks pretty cool. It allows you to share a live video feed from your phone; Jared had someone in the audience do the live feed to qik using Jared's iPhone. I liked Jared's acronym for public speaking (L)ock eyes, (I)ntonation, (P)ause as well. This will definitely come in handy for me in the future.

The part that surprised me the most was how few people in the audience new about Blogs and Feed Readers. Another shocker was how few people had heard of The Pragmatic Programmer. Maybe people were just too lazy to raise their hands. If not, c'mon TCJUG attendees!

Thanks for flying all the way to Minnesota to enlighten us Jared!