Hiking...

I came back from a hiking trip yesterday evening. Very relaxing experience even though my neck is very stiff and it's very painful to turn my head...

All the way when were walking in the woods, I tried to find some kind of an analogy to projects and project management or at least to teamwork, but at the end I just figured out that hiking is an individual effort, even you're hiking with your friends. The only support you get is the pressure from them that keeps you from stopping and keeps you moving those feet, no matter how painful it is.

Some additions to site

I added some new features to the blog.

1. Now reading... box on the right side. Tells which book(s) I'm currently reading and what I read previously. I have a habit of reading at least three books a month, maybe I even should list these somewhere with a short review...

2. Added Google search

3. Added work related links section, that hopefully will be quite dynamic and changing according to my situations. Now including mainly basic agile sites I use a lot.

4. Added links for the events I'm taking part. Maybe I should use Upcoming for this... Hmm..

End of silent period

Haven't have time to write anything on this blog for a while. Quite much has been happening since XP2007 and my summer vacation. I have been quite busy at work with promoting our agile trainings and trying to build some kind of network. At the same time I have been giving a large number of different kind VB.NET, Symbian, C, C++ and Java programming courses. Well, at least these keep you in touch with the development.

I'm quite excited about our new agile courses and hopefully people will find their way in them. To help this we have been working with my colleagues to publish articles (few examples at the company website, in Finnish only), create workshops and keep seminar presentations. Latest of these happened during ELKOM 07 fair at Helsinki in last month. It was very nice to see that almost without marketing (from our side at least), we got room full of listeners eager to find out more about agile software development and its suitability to embedded world.

What makes me also enthusiastic is the Agile seminar arranged by Agile finland yesterday evening at Helsinki. Good seminar where all of the speakers gave me something.

Craig Larman presented the Lean ideas and even though these were familiar to me, I at least got a reassurance that there are probably a lot of people who think that Lean has a lot to offer. I feel like Lean thinking plays key role in solving the problems of large-scale offshore projects.

Petri Haapio gave a valuable data how agile development is implemented in Nokia Networks and later in NSN. A lot of few interesting points to share people on courses.

Finally Lasse Koskela guidelines for facilitating change in form of 15 excellent points. Lasse's ideas seem to be a bit aligned to my thoughts about learning through failures and retrospectives. Making better developers by forcing them to think. Very good stuff all in all...

Well, those were the topmost things on my mind today. Hopefully I'll have time to come back with new ones as soon as possible.