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imageFor anyone in the Houston area this Friday, our founder – Caleb Jenkins – will be speaking at the Agile DOTNET Conference hosted by Improving Enterprises and Microsoft. We’re really excited for this year’s conference – it seems that our friends over at Improving like to take it up a notch each year. Last year the Houston event was at the Microsoft office.. this year, it’s at a Major League Baseball Park with an after party watching the Astros play the Dodgers!

Caleb will be pulling from his experiences working with global agile teams to talk about 3 patterns that we’ve used to scale scrum. This talk is a lot of fun, and we’re hoping everyone will have something that they can take away from it.

If you’re planning on attending.. be sure to swing by and say hi!


Image Credit – Chris Weldon

Workshop Agile + UX

November 12, 2011    Category: Events   No Comments »

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Big Design Week starts Monday, and we’re thrilled to announce that our own Caleb Jenkins has been asked to help present on Wednesday’s workshop! He’ll be digging in to the dicey topic of UX and Agile with Brian Sullivan and Jim Carlsen-Landy. We’re looking forward to hearing how these three present together. They all come at Agile and UX teams from slightly different angles. Jim has managed UX teams for a couple of years at a company that was an early adopter of agile practices, and Brian will be walking through hands on techniques to get scrappy with your UX research, design and deliverables.

Caleb will be focusing in on some of the misconceptions that exists between the agile and UX worlds and specifically how teams can scale Scrum with UX teams. It’s going to be awesome! Check out the full week’s schedule, and if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time to register.

See you there!

2011

We’re excited that Caleb will be speaking in Tulsa tomorrow at the Tulsa School of Dev.

He already blogged about it; he’ll be speaking on “10 Reasons Your Software Sucks” and then round things out with with “Taming the Legacy Code Beast”. These are both information packed talks with real word strategies to learn from.

Be sure to register now and then check out the other sessions. It’s going to be a full day! Make sure you stop by and say hi!

As Caleb pointed out, this year our friend Jay Smith has taken on the goal of spear heading a Community Leadership Town hall at the Tulsa Tech Fest.

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What is a Community Leadership Town Hall? Jay’s post summarizes it well

The evening will be filled with discussions about issues, ideas, and solutions regarding creating, maintaining, and growing user groups and technical communities.   This will be a highly interactive night where everyone will have a chance to suggest a topic and voice their opinion.

Bring your questions, ideas, issues, and willingness to share to the Community Leadership Town Hall – Tulsa.

We know that it’s no small task to pull so many different leaders together, provide content for everyone and keep all of the participants engaged. We’re looking forward to attending and participating! Hope to see you there.

Speaking at Tulsa Tech Fest this Friday

November 10, 2010    Category: Events   No Comments »

This Friday Caleb will be presenting at the 5th annual Tulsa Tech Fest. We’re excited to continue our involvement in the greater technical community, as an INETA speaker Caleb has presented at User Groups all over north America since 2005. This is an exciting time and a fun event packed with multiple tracks, check out the complete agenda, we’re sure that their will be something for everyone! Caleb will be presenting on “10 Reasons that your software sucks (and how to make it better)” and “Real World Windows Phone 7 Development with Silverlight” – both of these talks are a lot of fun and we can’t wait to catch up with everyone there. Be sure to stop by and say hi!

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Caleb at the 2007 Tulsa Tech Fest

If you haven’t registered for Open Camp yet –  it kicks off tonight! You still have time to register – it’s going to be a great time. Our founder will be covering some of the open source and free tools that are available from Microsoft and .NET community. There is a great .NET track at Open Camp this year; our talk will be Saturday right after lunch – be sure to stop by and say hi!

Update: We had a great time at OpenCamp! Caleb posted his slides over on his blog. Enjoy!

In order to peak your interest, here is a quick preview of two of the slides that we’ll be speaking from… :) see you there!

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Register for Open Camp here!
http://openca.mp/register/

Speaking at the Dallas Tech Fest

July 27, 2010    Category: Events   No Comments »

Dallas TechFest 2010

This Friday, July 30th, 2010 – our founder and principal mentor, Caleb Jenkins, will be speaking at the Dallas Tech Fest, and today is the last day to pre-register! Tech Fest’s are unique from other .NET Code Camp style events in that they pull some of the best speakers from a cross section of technologies. This is a great place to come mix it up and see what’s happening on the “other side of the fence”. This year the Dallas Tech Fest will have featured tracks for .NET, JAVA, PHP, Adobe Flex, ColdFusion, IT Pro and other Mixed Sessions.

This year, my friend and organizer Tim Rayburn has pulled together some elite speakers from across the country like Craig Walls (Spring in Action), Ted Neward (as in – The Ted Neward), Mark Piller (famous for his cross platform Adobe/.NET/Java applications), Matt Woodward (IT Specialist for the US Senate) and many many more.

Register today at http://DallasTechFest.EventBrite.com Use promo code LASTYEAR to save $25.00 – go register now!

This Thursday I’ll be speaking at the New York City .NET Developers Group.

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I’m looking forward to this talk.. I’ll be covering the 10 Practices that All Developers Should Start Right Now! (based on this 10 Practices for Developers blog series)

I recently took on a new client in the travel industry, even though they are based in Dallas – I am working with their .NET development team in New York. As a part of that I am making my first trek to the big apple. I’m really looking forward to this trip to get to know the dev team that I’ve been working with remotely up until now. I’m also taking advantage of this trip visit the NYC .NET Meetup group and to speak at the local INETA .NET Developers Group.

If you’re going to be in the New York City area this week, be sure to ping me – I’d love to meet up with you at one of these events!

Be sure to RSVP!

image It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog so I thought that I should catch everyone up to speed. I gave Six Flags my two week notice 3 weeks ago.. and started a new company last week. Someone asked me how long it took me to put together my new company, 20 years of hard work.  :)

Introducing Proaction Mentors… although it really could be written with an optional plural form:

Proaction Mentor(s)

 

Obviously this is something that I’m extremely excited about! I’m also super busy with billable client work and speaking engagements (all good problems to have!) I’ll be blogging about Proaction more in the weeks to come, especially as the website launches, the business plan solidifies, and new announcements develop! (Stay up to date by Like’ing Proaction on Facebook and following us on twitter.

In the mean time – I hope to see you at some of these upcoming events!

image Improving’s Agile .NET Conf – Improving Enterprises (my good friends and former employer) hosted the Agile .NET Conference at Microsoft again this year. I was honored to be the only non-Improving person invited to speak! – April 30th

image Dallas .NET User Group’s Visual Studio 2010 Community Launch! – to celebrate the RTM (release to market) of Visual Studio 2010, the Dallas .NET UG is having an all out bash… 8 speakers in 1 night! Come see my talk:
Silverlight 4 – World Domination! – May 13

image Big (D)esign Conference is happening again! This time it’s over twice as BIG as last year! Seriously, my hat goes off to the organizers and the local DFW UPA! That put together an amazing conference last year that I was excited to be a part of (Silverlight 3: Bringing Back the Sexy) and this year, they’ve more that doubled the size and scope. Amazing! Hope you can make my strategic talk on “The 10 Practices that every developer should start right now”.  – May 28th & 29th

image Dallas Tech Fest – What could be better than last year’s inaugural Tech Fest in Dallas? Why, the second year of Tech Fest of course! Tech Fests are unique in the way that they specifically work to pull in technologies from various stacks… not just .NET – expect to see .NET, Ruby, Java, Silverlight, Flex, iPhone development as well as a healthy open conference style area. I was a little crazy and submitted 5 different talks to this event, I’m certain I won’t do all of them… but I’m looking forward to seeing what Tim picks!- July 30th

Update: This just in.. there is a “rumor” that I might present at a two day work shop style event in Dallas some time in June. Stay tuned!

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Bring your A game, do your best, leave it all on the field. That’s how I roll… until last night. Last night I presented on MVVM in Silverlight at the North Dallas .NET Users Group. It was a great turn out with a lot of interaction and excellent questions. Huge thanks to the organizers for having me, and to every one that turned out for it!

OK, I learned two big lessons last night. First, don’t prep your demo’s with a source control system that you are not 100% comfortable with yet.. second, don’t keep your speaking engagements when you’ve been taking care of sick people all week.

Don’t get sick

This week, my family got hit bad with Rotavirus. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this was a bad week in the Jenkins home. We had to deal with this bug once before when our oldest son was a baby… it was bad then, now times that by five. My wife, son, and 3 daughters have had a rough week to put it mildly. Fortunately, I work for a great company that let me work from home this week so that I could help take care of them. I’m also fortunate that I’ve been fine this whole week… until last night.

Right in the middle of my talk it hit me, whoa.. light headed… oh no, I might need that trash can… ugh. I’ve never gotten sick in the middle of a talk before – not fun.

Fortunately I was able to take a 5 minute break, get some fresh air, and then finish my talk. I came home with a fever and have been laying in bed since. I’m grateful for the awesome vitamins that we take (especially the pro-biotics) because here I am – just over 12 hours later – feeling much better.

The last time that I was scheduled to speak at the NDDNUG I got a chest cold leading up to it, fortunately my friend Aaron Erickson was in town and filled in with a great talk on Dynamic Languages and the DLR. Note to self: If you could be sick (it’s hard because I really don’t get sick that often) find a replacement presenter.

Using GIT

It’s all David’s fault. :) Well, Dave and TekPub.
My friend Dave (@davidmohara) is constantly pulling out and showing off the cool shiny toys. He’s the one that got me to start using CodeRush (no seriously, he’s a CodeRush ninja), he’s the one that got me to look at ASP.NET MVC completely differently, and then recently he’s become the unofficial GIT guide to several of us at the MVP Summit. So, Dave, combined with a 1 month subscription to TekPub that I won at the last Community for MVC.NET group got me interested in using GIT.

By the way… TekPub is awesome, I’ll talk more about them for another time, for now, go check out the preview to using GIT.

The nice thing about GIT is that you can quickly and easily create local branches and commits without standing up a server anywhere. It sounded like a great way to fork out my demos so that I could work in a single directly and just take snapshots (branches) along the way while I was prepping the talk. I still think I’ll end up using GIT for that, but last night in the middle of my talk I couldn’t remember how to roll back changes to one branch in order to switch to a different branch. You can’t leave a branch that has uncommitted changes, you either have to commit them or roll out of them. For anyone interested – the command that I was looking for was “git reset –hard [name of branch]” – would have come in handy last night. :)

So my own stumbling over git combined with a mid-talk fever made for an interesting night! Again, a big thanks to the organizers and attendees, and my  apologies for giving you my C game.

Hopefully, Lesson learned.

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