Sunday, September 25, 2011

xtc Berlin

Late Tuesday evening, the night before the ALE conference started, I sat in the hotel bar of the venue talking to people who had arrived early. Looking around, I thought, "cool, it's like an extreme tuesday club in Berlin". Since then I've been thinking about what it would take to actually create something like this in Germany.

So what is the extreme tuesday club?
A regular London meeting (weekly) for Agile/XP/Kanban/Scrum newbies, practitioners, and experts. (*)
That's not very elaborate but I like that it casts a fairly wide net in terms of target audience.

There are already a lot of different software and agile related user groups in Berlin and I like what I've seen of them so far. But each of these only cater to a specific topic or technolgy.

I'm looking for something less formal. Have a beer, talk to people about what they're working on, share war stories, cross-pollinate new ideas, ask for help or give help, if wanted. I would hope it would be as inclusive as possible. So, newbie or expert, programmers, PM/POs, design people, start-uppers, whatever - as long as you care about what you're doing and want to talk with people about it, it should be fine.

I did a little open space session at ALE on this and there seemed some general interest and I said I would just try and get this rolling and just see what happens.

Someone suggested the Cafe 100 Wasser as a pub to go to. And that's where I'll be, this Tuesday from around 8pm onwards. I'd be happy for you to join me. If you do plan to come, please let people know on Twitter.
[we've since changed pubs around quite a bit. Twitter is probably the safest bet to find out where people are. We're now usually at the Prater Garten in Prenzlauer Berg]

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Some closure (ha!) to 7 Languages in 7 Weeks

I'm currently trying to work through a backlog of things I've been meaning to blog about. And at the top is this post. The whole experience deserves being wrapped up properly. But I'll keep it brief.

When last I wrote about it, I was somewhere in the middle of week 6, working with clojure. This is probably my favourite of the languages in terms of learning new things and offering new perspectives while also having enough momentum that I might actually be able to do something with it at some point. I really hope this doesn't fall victim to my inherent lazyness.

The last week dealt with Haskell. At this point I was so busy with moving apartments and starting my new job that I barely managed to read the chapter but didn't get to try the examples. It sounded interesting but maybe a bit too strict. Others in the study group seemed to like it a lot though.

So, what's left to say. I really appreciated the study group and being able to learn from other people's code on github.

I enjoyed the weekly google hangout sessions with the others, when I was able to join them. I particulary liked how aimee facilitated those, keeping track of threads of discussions and making sure everybody got to say something.

The book requires quite a bit of commitment to get the most out of it but where I did that I felt it was well worth it.

I certainly recommend doing this together with other people. And share your experience with the world. 

All in all, I stick to what I said in my first post on this.We live in amazing times!