coclarity

It was over two weeks ago but I’m just getting to post these slides from a talk I gave in IT@Galway. Things have been crazy busy in the world of coClarity. The talk tied together Patterns, Scrum, eXtreme Programming, GTD and Ferris’ Four-Hour-Workweek.

While agile techniques owe their inspiration to other disciplines, like design-patterns, they have been improved by the software industry. So even if your business has nothing to do with software development or “agile” you can probably apply some of these ideas and practices.

The slides are on slideshare.

About 45 people showed up at the the Cairnes Business School in NUIG. Kieran Conboy of NUIG also talked about the future of agile techniques and how they compare with each other.

I told some stories of first-hand experience applying agile techniques in tiny, medium and massive companies. The stories began at a “fringe” talk at OOPSLA 98 where eXtreme programming was unveiled on green single-sheet handouts, continue to 1999 and applying Scrum before anyone really knew what it was, then on to 2003 where both eXtreme and Scrum were used on the development of drivers/firmware for a very successful processor. The stories culminate in the present day where the techniques are being used to bootstrap a web-application for project coordination (coClarity).

We had a good interactive chat with some excellent questions lobbed in from the audience. I even got to chat with some former colleagues from Tellabs and Digital afterwards. Last week I got to reuse some of the slides in a guest lecture to 3rd year engineers in Limerick Institute of Technology.

Someone from Enterprise Ireland was there and they’re talking about organising a repeat of the talks in Cork and Dublin.

Damien Mulley describes the Tuesday Push as “a way for the small but growing tech community in Ireland to make some noise about ourselves by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday.” Its another great idea from Damien, and a great example of taking positive action and doing something in these “interesting times”. Past Tuesday pushes included companies like PutPlace and Pix.ie.

This week’s push is for Dublin, Ireland based IGOpeople. “IGOpeople is a network for the real world, one place online where you can stay connected with the people, groups and organisations who matter to you”. Its essentially a set of threaded discussions with voting that people can use to interact with other individuals, groups of people or with an organisation (hence the IGO). Their business model is around subscriptions from business organisations.

The design of the site is excellent, modern but inobtrusive. It has some nice Ajaxy scrolling effects and rich-text textareas. The groups and discussion threads are well organised. It looks like business organisations are gravitating to the site as well so maybe some of them will do some listening.

I talked to Campbell Scott the CEO at Barcamp in Cork last November. It sounds like they have bigger plans for the product and altruistic goals about contributing to society. I think developed in Ruby on Rails (always a good sign). Darragh Curran from the technical team contributes to the Ruby Ireland group (another good sign).

Check it out.