Dave Noderer's Blog

XP Lego game at Ft Lauderdale Agile

Dave Noderer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:05:20 GMT

Sitting here watching Adrian Wible run the eXtreme Programming Lego game.

~ 40 people have been split into 6 groups, each with a number of cards describing customer wishes and a pile of legos.

Pictures at: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/gallery/8256.aspx

Video :

Process shortened for the 1.5 hr meeting. The goal is three iterations.

Step 1: Estimation: 10 min - Relative difficulty

Step 2: Prioritization: 5 min. - What is the most important

Step 3: Signup: 5 min - What to do for the 1st iteration (5 min)

Step 4: Development: 5 min - Implement the signup

Step 5: Testing / Totals: 10 Min - Measure actual against estimated effort and the signup / actual value

Step 6: Retrospective: 5 min - Have both customers and teams review work.

Iteration #2 - 40 min - More requirements

IPM Iteration Planning Meeting - 20 min
- Estimation
- Prioritization
- Signup

Then steps 4,5,6 repeated.

Only got through 2 iterations by 8:45 pm so cut it off there. The 2nd iteration for all the teams was both more productive and generally much closer to the estimate.

This is giving us a lot of ideas for future meetings!

Does anyone else have interactive games like this??

TechEd 2008 Tweener Weekend - What we learned

Dave Noderer — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:43:03 GMT

Updated: 2008-06-10

The first Teched Tweener weekend aka ]InBetween[ was put together by our Developer Evangilist, Joe Healy and the Florida community leaders. The event was two days held on June 7/8, 2008 between the Developer and ITPro weeks of Teched in Orlando.

We had nine rooms to utilize and Joe asked a number of people to lead specific tracks which included .NET Code Camp, Day of Silverlight, Agile Camp, RoboCamp, ITPro Camp, SQL University, ToolShed, Office Communications Server University, DotNetNuke University and a large Open Space area. All this shifted and changed as we approached the actual event but is a good representation of what happened.

The whole weekend was a great experience and hopefully future tweener weekends will be even better.

Some lessons learned were:

Open Space: Make people go to the open space, either have the registration there or force them to go visit in order to get coffee, schedules, etc.
Open Space: Organize the open space (assuming a large area) with the vendors, information, user groups, and other organizations in the middle so that people can take a "tour" so it would be clear where to go.
Open Space: Make sure there are specific tables for event information and user groups. Or more than one user group table even if someone wants to staff it.
We had the corners setup with small seating areas and a large plasma screen for presentations. Make sure you get some things scheduled in advanced and publicized so that there will always be something going on while still leaving open slots for dynamic scheduling.
Open Space: Create a dynamic scheduling tool so that when people sign up for it is all automatic (From Nikita who ran the open space).
Location: Get all the rooms in the same area, same floor and ideally all together. I can attest to the issues and many miles of walking I had to do to keep track of four rooms on different floors and opposite sides of the South end of the convention center in Orlando.
Schedules: Put someone in charge specifically of the overall track schedules so that the room assignments and track titles are always up to date.
Schedules: Make each track publish a more detailed session schedule, it was very confusing to attendees that many of the tracks did not have any detail ahead of time and in some cases the day of the event.
Schedules: Maybe even put someone in charge of getting all the schedules printed. It is very useful but has to be done the morning of the event to have the best chance of being up to date. This means that the convention center kinko's that opens at 9am will not do. I submitted the job online the night before and picked up the printing at a nearby kinkos the next morning.
Schedules: Have all sessions start at the same time. There was confusion as to when various things started. As much as possible, synchronize all sessions.
Registrations: Make a central website for all the info, we used Joe Healy's Devfish.net blog site which was ok but he is busy too and updates took a long time in some cases.
Registrations: Make a central scheduling tool that allows the attendees to click off the days and events. Allow the track chairs to monitor counts and get the name/emails afterwards. This was another point that was very confusing to attendees with every track having a different registration. From the event viewpoint only a master list of names was required. With this, registration could be left open until the night before the event when the badges could be printed, instead of collecting all the registrations days in advance.
Web: Shawn Weisfield (I think) registered floridatweener.com, I registered techedtweener.com and .net which I'm happy to donate to future tweener events but I suspect the tweener name will not survive exposure to the Microsoft machine...
Signage: We really did not have any signage, a few suggestions without going too crazy:
- Directions at the entrances to the convention center where registration is located
- Directions inside the convention center to the Open Space area. Open Space is where all the information, schedules and directions can be obtained.

Party: Nothing more to add here, nobody will top the party that Jessica Sterner arranged at the Destiny night club. .net girls and a project runway competition will give you the flavor...
Swag: There was a lot of confusion about swag, even for me. All of a sudden there were books in some of the rooms to be distributed. Some people got no books and others went from room to room collecting as much as possible. One idea would be to give a few books to each speaker to distribute at their session but then make everyone come to the open space room where we could setup a "free" bookstore.
Swag: Giving away a few X-Box's at the event would be great. For the code camp tracks I had a couple but none of us had discussed in advance how the distribution would work and I did not have anything setup. In the end I took mine to the party where they got lots of public exposure.
Evaluations: Don't try to use evals for giveaways, this gets too complicated and did not work at all this weekend. One problem is that there was not a space for the person's name or email, which makes sense as you probably get more accurate evals if anonymous but useless for drawings.
Raffle: Just give each person a raffle ticket as they register or maybe better a raffle ticket for each session they attend. At the end have a raffle and give away the valuable swag plus any books or software that might be available.
Rooms: Assign a host to each rooms or at least those that are next to each other. Make sure the speaker is hooked up and working. Point out / help with microphones / AV. Make announcements.
Name: Kyle Baley suggests Twixter as sounding cooler than Tweener (and perhaps more acceptable to Microsoft) and some more punch than InBetween (my opinion).

I'll add more as I think about it or hear from others.

Arrived at Teched 2008

Dave Noderer — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:53:32 GMT

Sitting in the "bloggers" lounge near the stage.

Nice backpack with much heavier duty zippers than last year.

Out of XL staff shirts, only 2XL and M left...

INETA User Group Leader Summit will be in N330 AB at 2:30 PM.

Broken LCD Replaced!

Dave Noderer — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:12:48 GMT

The LCD display on my Nikon L11 (simple point and shoot) broke sometime during Steve Balmers talk at the MVP summit this year.

Having heard all the horror stories, i figured this camera was done for. I got a quote of ~ $150 to fix it from an online service but that is more than it is worth.

So... i disassembled the camera, i figured i had nothing to lose.

After a few very nasty shocks reminded me about the large capacitor used to fire the flash, i bought a 1k ohm, 1 watt resistor from Radio Shack and via volt meter verified the two obvious terminals were in fact the place to discharge the flash at.

I got it down to the LCD and could get the part number (which i did not really need).

I called Nikon and ordered the LCD for ~ $60. Not that it was necessairly worth fixing the camera and i had already bought a new one (a smaller, more expensive S210) but now it was a personal challenge!

I could not figure out right away how to release the circuit cable attaching the LCD to the board in the camera so i WISELY and carefully wrapped all the pices and screws untl the new LCD arrived.

It came today and the release of the cable became clear to me. I replaced the LCD and spent another 1/2 or so carefully putting all the pieces back together.

I put in some batteries and it actually worked!

Then i reailizedi had left the protective plastic on the LCD but was able to get it off from the outside.

Now i have a second working camera!!

DotNetRocks on Building Communities!

Dave Noderer — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:06:06 GMT

Even if you don't listent to DotNetRocks on a regular basis (you should!), if you are a user group leader or interested in starting a user group you should listen to this show.

It is been quite a while since DotNetRocks has had a community focused show.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

Show #344 | 5/22/2008 (69 minutes)
Building Communities at Dallas TechFest

Carl and Richard talk with three community leaders in Dallas about building communities, and specifically how you can directly benefit from participating locally.

This DotNetRocks session touchs on many of the most important points about running a user group.

A few things I can add...

- At one point INETA (International .NET Association, www.ineta.org), when the .net community was being built, had large user group leader summits that got a wide variety leaders and potential leaders and everyone always walked away pumped up and excited about all the new ideas they heard about at the sessions. This in my mind was another very significant benefit that INETA delivered. Unfortunately funding dried up as it was hard to make a case for the Microsoft "numbers" system to understand the much deeper reach this had on the community and Microsoft. Everyone leaving one of those meetings had a wide and lasting effect in their respecitve communities. None of us were smart enough to figure out how to translate this comitment to the very large numbers Microsoft likes to see!

- Another benfit of INETA in the early days was to really mentor new user group leaders and potential leaders. This was dropped at some point and personal and ongoing communications between INETA and the user group leaders was stopped. Having helped mentor many hundreds around the world to start user groups this was crucial at one point. The .net community has maturred now and perhaps this type of mentoring is not as important.

- One social / community building thing I like to do is to go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves.

Leaders, speakers and members can get to know who is in the room and what they might be interested in
Many of the developers may not be use to speaking in front of a crowd. I know it is small but believe just this small exercise may help some people out of their shell
It sets the tone for a more interactive meeting.

- I do agree that charging a small annual fee (I don't) is not necessairly bad and may be required if you have to pay for the venue (which usually is not necessary) but it does add a fairly significant additional set of tasks on a monthly basis for someone to collect money, keep track of the members, deposit money, write checks and do a bit of accounting at the very least. My thought is that all admin functions should be kept to a very small minimum, nobody really loves doing them and volunteer hours should be very carefully spent!

- We did a "Code Idol" meeting which was good but none of us could be mean like Simon! In the end, our judges were part of the vote but next time we will rely only on having all the participants face the front wall and have a silent vote by the rasing of hands. I think it is time to do another one!

- Thse days the Microsoft Developer Evangalists are very active in starting and supporting user groups, this was not always the case. So... if you are starting or want to start a user group, definitly find out who your most local DE is! Our DE's Joe Healy, Russ Fustino and Jeff Barnes are very active and Joe keeps the entire state of Florida influencers linked together. If you are having trouble finding out your local DE let me know, I can help you or direct you to someone who can.

- Finding committed volunteers for any organization is always a challenge. As Toy pointed out, you have to ask people to do things. Over time, some will respond and get interested, many will not. In all cases it has to be fun, even if it is a bit of work there has to be personal growth or reward or people will not do it over time.

Thats all for now!

Guy from Boston on WTKK!

Dave Noderer — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:13:04 GMT

http://www.bostonradiowatch.com/

Dave makes Computer World

Dave Noderer — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:03:10 GMT

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085698&pageNumber=1

Bhamas Dot Net Meeting

Dave Noderer — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:06:29 GMT

I was honored to be able to attend the first meeting of the Bahams .net (www.bahanet.org) user group in Nassau last week.

Kyle Baly (http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/) organized the meeting held at a local comany IPBS.

Fairly small group but that is ok! None of them knew what to expect and surprisingly none of them were there due to a direct contact with Kyle but because someone told them about it.

After getting them warmed up to what was possible in learning, business networking and socializing, they all left very enthused and ready for the next meeting which as already been scheduled.

It does not seem that .net is quite as far along on the island as it is here in the states but maybe this is a message to me that we should address basic .net topics at our user group meetings in Florida. We have tried a few times but it has not continued. This was also brought up to me when someone who is fairly new to .net happened to go to the www.fladotnet.com webstie and looked at our first video (see link at bottom of right column) where Jason Beres was talking about basic clr and framework concepts (this was in the fall of 2001).

Another interesting thing was that there really is no techincal netowking to speak of in the bahams. Everyone who grew up there attended "COB", College of the Bahamass (http://www.cob.edu.bs/) but apparently students don't have access to free Microsoft software there and there is no continuing contact among the alumni.

So, even if there are qualified people on the island to do technical work (.net ,rpg, php, etc...) the tendancy is to go elsehwere, the United States or Canada for example.

People did not know about DotNetNuke, Robotics Studio and a number of other appealing dot net based projects and technologies they might be using.

It will be interesting to watch how this develops. The next meet scheduled for May 28th will cover basics of creating an asp.net website.

Thanks Kyle!!

TechEd 2008 Tweener Weekend - June 7/8

Dave Noderer — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:52:50 GMT

This year, US Teched will be held in Orlando starting on June 2^nd with the developer week and continuing the following week for IT Pros…

So it happens that the Orange County Convention Center is available and as many of you already know, the Florida people are putting together a number of things that include SQL, DotNet University, DotNetNuke, etc.. AND a Florida Code Camp which Shervin and I are heading up.

This is the first “tweener” weekend and may end up being a major event in and of itself. The will be lots of things going on before, during and after so even if you are not attending teched, a couple of nights in Orlando will be worth it!

Current schedule for code camp rooms: http://www.fladotnet.com/FloridaCodeCamp_2008_20080408.mht
More info on tweener weekend: www.tweenerweekend.com
Tweener weekend flyer: http://www.fladotnet.com/downloads/Inbetweenv04.pdf

Links to more information will be posted on the FlaDotNet.com site: http://www.fladotnet.com

Guy from Boston gets new web site...

Dave Noderer — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:36:42 GMT

The new site will be at: www.theguyfromboston.net

STS-123 Launch...

Dave Noderer — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:00:29 GMT

About 1 1/2 years ago I emailed a request to one of my senator's in Florida, Bill Nelson - D, for a pass to watch a shuttle launch. I got a fairly quick response, they had received the request but that the next flight was already booked. I would be on the wait list...

Fast forward to Feb 2008 and I got a call to see if I was interested in the Mar 11 (planned) STS-123 launch... Yeah!!

The launch is scheduled at 2:30 am which may be why I bubbled to the top of the list.

I got a written inviation from NASA and eventually detailed information on what to do.

This invitation is for the Banana Creek VIP Viewing area, where the countdown clock is, near the launch center and 3.3 miles from the launch pad.

One bad thing is I cannot take my laptop there so no real time reporting!

Report:

It was really great, this veiwing area is adjacent to the Saturn V visitors center with bleachers for a couple hundred.

There is a grassy area in front of the bleachers and that is where I sat/stood on the grass next to the 3' high fence. You could see the Vehicle Assembly Building to the right and the pad straight ahead. The launch was awesome, the only thing wrong was that there was a fairly low cloud ceiling, we figured about 10000 ft so the shuttle promptly dissapeared after laucnh.

This area is where the astronaut families watch from too (i'm 90% sure on this point) but they had a section of bleachers roped off at one end.

The visitors center was open for business and there were a number of conssessions.

I met a lot of really great people including a college engineering professor from New Orleans and his wife and college age son. As we were all professional nerds, the time went by fast talking about the shuttle, amps, robots and software. It turns out the son had done a summer internship a Michoud and worked on the pesky Engine Cutoff Sensors.

A big thanks to my Senator, Bill Nelson for making the trip possible!!

Photos: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!346/

The camera could just not deal with the initial launch brightness but there is a great picture of the plume after the shuttle has gone through the clouds.

In one of the most inventive moves I've ever witnessed, they had an annoucment before the launch that the solid rocket exhaust plume filled with Hydrocloric Acid would take 25 min to reach the viewing area so everyone should move quickly to the busses!

Code Camp 2008 South Florida Done -- Whew!

Dave Noderer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:43:38 GMT

It's all over, what a rush!

Final stats...

795 registered, over 600 showed up, 50 speakers gave 71 sessions over 12 parallel tracks.

We drank 1100 waters, 500 sodas, over 700 cups of coffee, ate 170 pizzas and used 300 pounds of ice.

Feedback can be viewed at: http://www.codecampevals.com/speakers/SpeakerEvals.aspx?CodeCampID=17

Some photos at: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!316/

Russ & Alex Photos:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rfustino/archive/2008/02/11/photos-from-the-code-camp-in-south-florida-2-2-2008.aspx

Speaker links as I get them: http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

Thanks to all the sponsors for making this great event happen!

No code camp would be possible without all the great speakers, some local and many who traveled to on their own with no monetary help from us. The entire developer community is grateful to each one!

I'd like to point out the other volunteers who helped make it all look easy! Many of them were speakers as well but I want to make sure they get the credit they deserve.

Ed Hill - Devry University Professor organized the venue, provided student volunteers, acted as "Intro to .NET" track chair, made multiple runs to Costco, received the material and was on the run all day Saturday during the event.

Scott Katarincic - created web administration pages without which we would have been poking in the datbase and the sesssion / speaker entries could not have been distributed.

Charles Curtis - Handled the sponsor images and displays, this was a big help!

DeVry Student Volunteers.. I don't have a list of names but without them and the help of Bob O'Connell (another Devry professor) we would have had to recruit a lot more volunteers for the day of the event. They did a great job, just point them in the right direction and they took off with the task at hand.

Alex Funkhouser - In charge of the T-shirts and t-shirt graphics plus organization of the commons for the sponsors and donated Mike Wasserman.

Mike Wasserman - Mike did all the legwork for organizing the speaker reception on Firday night and the post party at JP Mulligans on Saturday night. Both came off smoothly, people had plenty to eat and drink and did not go over the budget.

Jonas Stawski (Spanish), Larry Port (Agile), Jeff Barnes (Architecture) and Bill Reiss (Pre-Mix 08/Silverlight) stand out as excellent track chairs that spent considerable time thnking about and organizing their respective tracks.

I have to mention John Dunagan aka "ICE MAN" who for the second year in a row drove from Naples to deliver 300 pounds of ice... ok, he just poped over to public but it was a big help!

Mai Nguyen was our session monitor and kept a count of each session. Thanks!

Morgan Baker helped organize the un-organized speaker sessions with a spreadsheet that got us launched into the actual scheduling of sessions.

Shevin Shakibi as always provided great ideas and moral support and was the SQL/BI track chair.

Jose Luis Manners was a Spanish co-chair but was in the middle of a number of work issues and ended up being out of town during code camp.

Joe Healy as always was a great support but i think he enjoyed sitting back and watching it happen without a lot of his help. And this year he was very sick and just barely made it to code camp on Saturday! He helped locate and motivate a number of the speakers and as always is a valued part of the team!

Next year's code camp has been set for 2/8/2009.

South Florida Code Camp 2008 - 2/2/2008

Dave Noderer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:39:41 GMT

FREE - 4th Annual South Florida Code Camp - Register Now - Spaces are going fast!

To attend this free, all day .NET Developer mini-conference register at: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122048 ! The Code Camp will be held on Saturday 2/2/2008 and include breakfast, lunch, giveaways, valuable raffle items and of course lots of great content!

The sessions are now listed on the agenda page. A big thanks to all the speakers that have stepped forward and volunteered to come speak at their own expense. We have already scheduled 70 of 72 sessions. There will be something for everyone... from the person who is new to .net to advanced architecture and software process sessions. For the second year we will have an all Spanish track. Dedicated tracks include "Into to .NET", "Silverlight" and "Agile / CI". Sessions include Ajax, MVC, Visual Studio 2008, Powershell, Windows Workflow and .NET reflection.

Find more information at http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com . We have many sessions lined up. The track chairs will get them organized and on the website agenda over the next couple of weeks.

Way to go Joey!

Dave Noderer — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:08:50 GMT

It was amazing to watch the The Guy From Boston on the Tonight show last nigh. Bobbi and I struggled to stay awake but it was worth it!

You can watch the video at: http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/video/episodes.shtml

Go to the Jan 17th (2008) episode and the Joe Ligotti Chapter.

The Guy From Boston on Leno - ReScheduled for Thursday 1/17/2008

Dave Noderer — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:34:23 GMT

For Thursday 1/17/2008