Duncan Pierce duncanpierce.org

Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley’s Pragmatic Agile Coaching is available online at Pragmatic Bookshelf. The book is due out in the next few weeks.

I’ve known Liz and Rachel for a long time and they have a wealth of coaching experience. I think this will be a great book.

On organizational culture:

No-one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically devoted to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

I’ve just deployed a new website over at amarinda.com. The old one was pretty tired-looking — I think this one is a big improvement. I still need to upload details of quite a few training courses, workshops and descriptions of the coaching and mentoring I provide, but it’s a good start.

I discovered this list of quotes by Winston Churchill. Churchill had a way with words, so I picked out a few quotes that seem to say something interesting about Agile development.

On feedback:

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

The Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) has moved to a new home at the Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London EC3V 3PD — another Fuller’s pub. We’ve been at the Old Bank of England for 8 years now and felt it was time to try somewhere new. For those of you at XPDay this year, this was the pub we were at on Tuesday night.

Javascript is a prototype-based language which has some slightly unusual semantics if you are used to languages like Java and C#. Classical OO inheritance isn’t trivial in Javascript – at least not conceptually. There are many webpages out there out there offering various solutions. Many of them propose complicated and strange answers to the problem, when actually it’s pretty simple.

This is the second time I’ve attended the Agile Business Conference (ABC). The first time was ABC’s inaugural year of 2005. I had some misgivings about the direction ABC was taking in 2005, but based on attending this year I think some things are improving.

Registration for XPDay 2007 is now open.

The XPDay programme committtee met last week and in a very well organized (by Angela Martin) meeting we agreed what I think is the strongest programme we’ve yet seen at the conference — more sessions, more tracks, more diverse topics. Keep an eye on the website for the full programme announcement.

If you’re thinking of submitting a session for XPDay, do it now! The final day for submissions is Tuesday 31st July.

Should you submit a session? We encourage you to share your ideas, knowledge and questions. Even if it’s incomplete; even if it’s bad news; even if it’s just a question, the programme committee can help you shape it into a session that will teach you as much as your audience. And if your session is accepted your place at XPDay 2007 is free.