This past week was a busy one, which is the main reason for me not blogging much. Lots of things happening at work, with the upcoming Agile Seminar, and the book project which is having its first birthday real soon...
As a small tribute to my late night stream of consciousness, congratulations and good luck to Priya for the you-know-what. And try to get some sleep now while it's still (I guess) easy.
I did my talk on building quality with agile methods at the Merito Forum on Wednesday, again with my Lessig/Takahashi-inspired style of presentation getting some (mostly positive) attention. This time, I wrote the handout in the form of an essay which I found to be extremely helpful in spotting deficiencies in the sequence of the presentation. I spend a lot of time rehearsing for my public appearances so it's a good thing I've got almost a full month before the next one. Can you believe they only put 24 hours into each day? Sometimes I feel like I could use a couple of extra...
Speaking of time, it's starting to look like I've also managed to stuff my calendar for the next couple of months with some exciting work engagements. I can't say much about them but I will say that two subsequent 8-hour days of developing a training course (significant portion of that time pair programming) is harder work than it might look like from outside the meeting room. It's the intensity that's the real drainer. But now we have a pink plotter. Oh, you didn't hear me say that. You don't know anything about the pink plotter, ok? You weren't here and this conversation never happened.
The Agile Seminar is going to take place on the Friday of March 17th. More on that in the next couple of days but when the registration is opened, it's all Rails baby! We had an email-based registration system for the Fall 2005 seminar and it turned out to be less than perfect. This time, we'll have a web-based system with email confirmation and I'm really happy about how easy Rails has made putting together something like what I'm talking about. I also saw the venue for the first time with my own eyes on Friday morning and I think it really rocks. We've once again got a good line-up and I have a hunch that the seminar will again kick some serious ass.
On the topic of kicking serious ass, I also received the first batch of feedback from the 2/3 review of the manuscript for my book. Very encouraging feedback at that. It's time to start a final push to get the remaining third sorted out and on paper... Not that the last third would be any easier than the first two. In fact, based on what I've seen and heard of the book writing business I'd wager it's quite the opposite.
Alright. It's time to close() this stream, catch any IOExceptions, and hit the bed. As you can sense from the pathetic attempt at humor, I really need the sleep :)