CodeCamp SA
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Mitch and Greg have both posted their thoughts on CodeCamp SA so I thought that I'd better mention it too. It was great to catch up and re-connect with several old Adelaide friends and also to spend time with colleagues again. Greg's talk on DMV's in SQL Server 2005 that was very interesting. There's a lot of functionality in there - particularly the new reporting features that come as a standard part of SQL Server - that I didn't know about. Dave Gardiner has posted a more thorough analysis of Greg's talk here.
On Saturday evening I went out for dinner with Mitch, Dave Glover, and Jey Srikantha (from K2) and we had some great food and conversation.
It was also great that Mitch could stay over at our house and catch up with our family again - the kids were delighted to spend time with "Mitchy Mitch" 
Mitch really helped me with getting my PowerPoint deck sorted out too!
My talk was a new topic that I'm working on and it was good to present it for the first time. It's basically a "Tips and Tricks" session about managing a remote development process. It was great to get it out there for the first time and I got some good feedback about the structure. Below is my deck for anyone who was interested or who was unable to attend. Next time I give this talk I'm going to change slides 15 and 16 from conversation-style slides and bust it out into maybe 6 more explicit "Tip and Trick" style slides. It will vastly improve the structure and make the outcomes much more concrete.
 | My opening slide |
 | It was originally advertised that I was going to talk about EntLib |
 | Nope |
 | Then it was advertised that I'd be talking about Enterprise 2.0 |
 | Nup |
 | The topic of this talk |
 | Who I am - professionally
* Consultant
* Accounting/Finance background
* My blog
|
 | Who I am - personally
* Coach of sporting teams
* Book author
* User Groups/Community
* MVP, ASPInsider |
 | Who I work for
* .NET Readiness Leaders
* Tech.Ed's, Code Camps, User Groups, ReMIX, etc
* Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane |
 | What I do
* [Showed video of Cat Herding]
* Herd cats
* Manage the Dev Centre |
 | What is the Dev Centre
* Manage internal development
* Some special characteristics |
 | 1 - We are Remote
* You cannot see your colleagues
* Easy to go dark
* You need strategies to work remotely |
 | 2 - We are Mobile
* Many tasks need to be done on devices
* Need to make work processes more asynchronous |
 | Our processes
* Our SCRUM implementation had to change
* We have had good success at introducing the business to iterative development
* Manage expectations of people coming to do work
* IT rocks. They work with us, not against us and are jointly a part of the delivery process. |
 | Our Tools
* TFS - don't just use, make it work for you
* TFS enhancements - TFSIntegrator, TFSDeployer, etc
* Shared View - pair programming
* Connected One Note sessions - our whiteboard |
 | How we Communicate
* Wiki-based open communications policy
* Good use of detailed check-in comments
* Outcome-based scrums as opposed to task based
* Message oriented communication |
 | Thanks for coming!
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