Silver Key [SK]

Real World Scrum Best Practices Through My Project Team Member's Experience

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:18:19 GMT

Mohamed Nour, a really smart decent guy with superior technical skills is one of the great guys I work with right now in a really big project that's in it's last stages right now.. He wrote an excellent article talking about the lessons we have learned and the experiences we as team and individuals got through applying Scrum methodologies on the project.

The article summarizes months of different techniques, some are standard, some we just made up ourselves; and how influenced our project, and how it can influence any other project running Scrum. It's really useful not just just for those interested in Scurm methodology, but any developer working in a serious big / long taking project.

Read the article ... "Scrum In Action".

P.S.

Nour was the only member in the team I've never worked with before the current project starts, however, his many skills and productivity were so clear from his articles, technical talks and moreover his older team members talk about it. Working with Nour and the rest of the current team (Mohamed Tayseer, Mai Soliman and Emad Lotfy doing the tough testing, LOL) was one of the true blesses of working in such big project. Plus the experiences we all had of course by practice, which Nour summarized a great deal of it in terms of project management, and we still have had in other areas like architecture. I always wanted to talk about it, and it seems that I really should.

More on Demo Day - Reviews, evaluations, materials and even more...

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:06:42 GMT

For all those who attended DemoDay II, thanks again and again for coming. We pretty much much enjoyed having you with us, and we think that the DemoDay 2 fun time is not done yet!
I write this to let you notice the cool stuff about DemoDay II.
Check out the Demo Day website www.demoday.us for more event stuff. We are updating the site with:

Session Materials (Slides + Demos)
Audience Evaluation Results for Sessions and Organization (Chart + Raw Excel File)
Quotes from your feedback (send us yours)
Session Videos (Soon...)

Keep an eye on the DemoDay website for more soon to come!

If you have more ideas on how to keep the soul and fun of DemoDay II until we get to DemoDay III, please email us (or just leave a comment here), we'll be very pleased to get such inspiring input.

Demo Day - The past, present, and future

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:27:54 GMT

Now that Demo Day II is done, and we are getting so much motivating feedback, it feels great to have achieved something. Some of the feedback we got we people surprised by the idea of the event, wondering about things like "Why" and "How" we managed to run the DemoDay, twice.
Questions like these and more inspired Dody to write about the origin of DemoDay. In his post, Dody talks about our own internal DemoDay, how we thought about "Why not open this to public?", and how we managed to actually do it. The ways we thought of to get an even better DemoDay the 2nd time, and a few of our thoughts for the next DemoDay, DemoDay III.
If you ever wondered about the internals of the whole thing, you might want to have a look.
Read More

Demo Day II - We did it, again!

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:01:15 GMT

Yesterday was SilverKey Demo Day 2. It seems that all stress, fear, and most importantly lots and lots of teamwork preparations were all it takes to get the joy of a successful event, again!

The prize we got was worth it. Such a great audience, all cool people, great questions, and sweet comments. What makes us happy is that we think we have done something to you, as you have been such inspiring.

Just wanted to give a big thank you, to SK team, and to the entire audiance, who all shared together the success of this day.
Remember, this is just DemoDay II, and, there's always more to come in next DemoDay

Update
Check out the DemoDay website for audience reviews (You can send us yours) and posts by other SK members related to DemoDay II.

SilverKey Demo Day 2 (SKDD2) FREE Registration - The 07/07/07 Event

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:59:40 GMT

Yesterday we started accepting FREE registration for the 2nd Demo Day. If you remember from the 1st one, Demo Day is an event we love to hold being our way to expose knowledge and most importantly excitement regarding the latest pre-release technologies to the developer community in Egypt, mainly focusing on technologies bound to Microsoft, as our chosen method of getting things done, plus other technical inspirations that we'd think most developers would benefit from, at least as a new way of thinking.

Last Demo Day we talked about C#3.0, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX (ATLAS by then, that was my session), UI Design, and Agile project management. This year we are planned to include: (Note: links lead to speakers' blogs)

Jasper (Based on Entity Framework fundamentals, and how RAD that is)
IronPython (vs. C#3.0 - A debate between static and dynamic languages supported by MS)
Silverlight (Introducing Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - including Architecture and showing inner power)
CLR By XAML (From WPF, to Silverlight, to MS Surface, the common language)
WCF (Answering the BIG question "What's SOA?", and how to apply it using WCF)
3D Game Development on Windows Platform (Using Torque game engine)
JavaScript (Deep into the language not various implementations, also includes Managed JScript) - By me
WF (A look at the practical scenarios, not the typical demos)
LINQ For XML (A master insight on how to approach maximum data processing productivity without pain, even with XML!)
Software Testing (Using Open Source .NET Tools)
SEO for Programmers (What web developers should "get" for ) - By me
Un-conference Session (An open mic session for open discussions on future technologies)

The conference this time will be in the International Conference Center (Arabic: قاعة المؤتمرات), Mankaure Hall (Arabic: قاعة منقرع), on July 7, 2007. Yeah, that's 07/07/07

check the conference website: http://www.demoday.us/ for more information about the sessions and speakers.

Also that's where you need to go in order to get your FREE REGISTRATION.

If you have been to our 1st Demo Day, you might also like to check its history page.

See you there

Update [Saturday, June 23rd, 2007]:

Hot Potato is no longer secret!!!

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:43:27 GMT

Hot Potato, a company and project that aim to narrow the gap between text and video, making videos easier to index and search. I and Tamer Zaki carried out the implementation of version 1.0 of Hot Potato's proof of concept project, providing some of the very basic functionalities for the complete project.

The set of ideas for Hot Potato used to be considered confidential. This is no longer true.

Here's a quote from Adam's [SK Co-founder] Announcement:

There is a company called Hot Potato that is playing around with different ways to present video, etc. online and make it more easily searchable.

For example, here is a documentary about pet overpopulation (David Duchovny is in it; pretty interesting); as you can see the text of the video is displayed with each scene (although for now it doesn't change as the video progresses, and yes the video is a little crappy in quality as this is just a proof of concept). So Google will be able to find specific phrases, quotes, etc. and users can actually start viewing at the exact scene that that phrase is mentioned.

This could be pretty interesting for fact-checking, etc; imagine being able to search all of a pundit's shows for their stance on specific issues and how those changed over time. Or watching the exact scene where your favorite movie quote was mentioned.

The original announcement.

SK QuickBooks SDK and XML expert starts blogging

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 23:22:00 GMT

Mai Soliman, the great developer that had to be a QuickBooks SDK expert as a primary part of her SilverKey work, has finally started blogging on SpellCoder. It looks like she knew I was going to kill her if it took her more to start

She also wrote a very basic introduction to QuickBooks in her blog. From seeing how many weird situations she got into with QB, I can have good predictions about her next posts in the same topic. I think she may have something to say also about WCF and dealing with XML in general (Mai, I'm getting you more and more involved, watch out )

Good work Mai. keep going

i'm a senior software engineer !!

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 02:49:00 GMT

First, it looks that things are finally going much better than used to for like 2 years or so (yeah yeah. I know they were not really bad!) this college term. I'm mainly much less stressed than usual. I'm getting some cool subjects (although I had to have some subjects for the second time, as last year was the first/hopefully-last year I fail subjects), and all SK people are more and more showing how great they are, and how much I should owe them.

Last Friday, I was given the title "Senior Software Engineer" in SilverKey. That was after a talk on some related people oriented roles (which almmost anyone is be so happy to practice with such great people like those we have in here0. Of course, the general attitude in SK is that you're always allowed (and even encouraged) to exceed what your job description traditionally allows (you must see what topics we argue about with Dody -the company founder- to understand what I mean :-D ), but still, having the title (especially before leaving the university) feels great :).

It even feels better cause those who have the same title here are like heroes to me. Having the same title of course doesn't make me such a hero or even makes me think for even a second I'm equal to them, but it still means that I must be doing at least a single thing right to have it !!!

SpellCoder.com Blogs are open for other non-SilverKey Egyptian Geeks - Forums more active too. Are you in ??

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:08:00 GMT

SpellCoder, as far as I know is the FIRST technical Egyptian bloggers community for developers ever, it started with some of SilverKey Egypt software engineers, and few of our friends, and had a great success so far.

Now, with the same passion that made us hold the first demo day event and work on the next one, we just wanted to get more in touch with the Egyptian developer community, all motivated by our personal passion, not related to SK work, especially that many of us have their individual roles in this community through ArabTeam2000 and some friend circles.

Mohammed Hosam / Bashmohandes, one of the most beloved senior software engineers in SilverKey Egypt, sent us all in Egypt office this message to our business mails:

Hey,

I think you may have heard about our sponsored community SpellCoder.com, I just want to inform you that if you want to have a blog on SpellCoder or anyone of your friends may need one, just contact me direct via email or personally and I’ll create them.

Second thing, we have started the Forums on SpellCoder so we want to make some startup activity as we did with blogs, so If you have anything you want to post in the forums spellcoder.com/forums/ like videos, articles, links, useful hints, tools … etc don’t hesitate just create an account and start posting immediately.

If you don’t care about online communities activity just ignore this mail, it is not part of SK work, it is just our pay back to the community which we are part of.

So, if you are interested in getting your own blog on SpellCoder, Just contact Mohamed on : mohammeds (AT) silverkeytech.com.

If you are interested in checking / sharing in the forums, just join the community, and start sharing your own ideas.

Thank you SilverKey :):):)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:39:00 GMT

Yesterday was my 21^st birthday, and today we are having an important meeting here in SilverKey Egypt office for each and every person in the office.

And guess what ?? They're celebrating me :):):):)

I never saw such surprises except in the movies :D

Thank you very much guys... LOVE YOU ALL :)

Note:

I'm blogging this while eating!