Agile on the Beach 2016: Empowering Teams to Change

I had the enormous pleasure to speak at the "Teams & Practices" track of this year's Agile on the Beach conference with my colleague Hanif. It was a bit of a last minute submission, with only two weeks to work out and prepare the full talk, but it was well worth it, as we joined an awesome bunch of speakers and attendees, and many great ideas got exchanged!

The Agile on the Beach speakers

Our talk was an experience report of the recent reorganisation of our development department from teams structured around architectural components to cross-functional, project-based, and much more fluidly structured feature teams which pull work from a single backlog. 

This transition was developed iteratively and from the ground up, rather than being imposed by management, and adjusted as the team saw fit based on frequent reflection and implementation of any resulting tweaks that were seen as necessary for productivity and team health. We argued that this empowerment was a key element for the success of this transition, but also outlined a number of key challenges we had to overcome during the regrouping.

Here are slides from our talk:

The Lay(wo)man Developer's Introduction to Security

Ever since I attended a number of talks focused on security at Velocity conference last year, I've been eager to strengthen my knowledge in the area further, and one of the outcomes of this was that I recently presented a very broad intro to security to my co-developers at 7digital.

It was a bit terrifying, as I still feel I've only scratched the surface, but I did want to sum up all the basic concepts and principles that most discussions of security revolve around (even if implicitly), as well as some of the specific concerns that become more relevant as DevOps culture and practices increasingly spread in the developer world.

I hope that these slides might be useful if you're on a similar mission!

How The Brain Learns

I took an amazing course on Coursera recently, called "Learning How To Learn." I would highly recommend it, as it explains really well how (according to what scientists know so far) the brain learns, and discusses a great number of practical tools to improve learning. A lot of it is initially geared towards people studying for exams, or coming to terms with subjects that aren't familiar to them yet, but great number of things discussed applies to the kind of learning and problem solving we're having to do in our jobs every day.

I was so excited about all the new information, that I mashed it all up into a presentation for this week's all staff knowledge sharing at 7digital, as I thought it would be useful for all of us (and because I learned that there's no more powerful way of learning something than to try and teach it). The slides of that talk are below.

SOLID Principles - The Interface Segregation Principle

A few of us have been running a number of sessions to introduce this year's Technical Academy apprentices at 7digital to the SOLID principles, and I ended up picking the Interface Segregation Principle. Below is my take on introducing it - the theoretical overview offered by the slides should ideally be followed by a hands-on session to get some practice!