Sherlock Holmes meets Mozaic Works at Wildcard Conference in Riga

Last week was the first Latvian IT community driven conference. I waited long for being a speaker at this event because I did not know a lot about the Latvian community. So I had one day to find out during this event what the Latvian community prepared for us.

Ever since a couple of months ago my paper was confirmed for this event, so all I needed to do was to fly to Riga. But apparently I found an acceptable price flight only on Sunday, so I needed to stay more than just one day, from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon. Given this fact, since I like to keep myself busy, I asked the organizers of Wildcard Conference if they would agree on adding a coderetreat on Saturday, just the day after the conference. They accepted, so I facilitated a coderetreat as well after the event.

Now, what is this Wildcard Conference about? Well, it is about bringing people together from several areas of IT. During the conference I met programmers, testers, business analysts, database administrators, agile consultants, database consultants, agile practitioners, trainers, etc. I really liked the diversity of the crowd and the atmosphere was like they were all there to learn something new.

I had the chance to explain what is Agile to a couple of people, and they were quite interested in the subject. I can say that during this conference I had a lot of interesting discussions.

My talk during this conference was “Sherlock Holmes and Pairing”, during which I explained why pair working is so important and how it triggers learning and better products. Here are the slides for the talk:

Soon, the conference organizers should upload the video of my talk as well, but we are patiently waiting.

On Saturday I met a group of passionate programmers who wanted to learn more about how to create better software. We had discussions about clean code, better design, object oriented programming and how to have faster feedback for your team and for your customers. The day was tiring especially because the constraints I chose during each session were meant to get them out of their comfort zone. And why that? Well, because this is how learning happens: when you do something you are not used to. Of course during one session my teddy bear wanted to pair with one of the coderetreat attendees, so Teddy-Bear pair-programming did happen during this coderetreat!

So my Latvian experience was a positive one. I enjoyed the events organized by the Latvian communities, and I hope I will come back soon to another event organized by them.

Troubles with communication and effective team work? We can help with:

• An assessment on your organizational practices
• Calling one of our coaches in for facilitating a pair-programming session
• Attending the “Code retreat” workshop, also available in-company
• Attending the “Legacy code retreat” workshop, also available in-company
• Attending the “Unit testing core practices” workshop, also available in-company

If the situation is more complex, we would be happy to create a customized package for your needs.

image credit: http://img.thesun.co.uk/aidemitlum/archive/01090/SNF2301TVCC-380_1090987a.jpg