It is a cold winter day in Dublin. A good friend of mine, an excellent software architect and entrepreneur, is finally ready to deploy his application. The last few months had been the toughest. He had spent almost 3 years building his dream. Being a perfectionist is not easy. Dealing with those new damned servers [...]

As I have started doing some serious work on refining the structure of my Agile tales of creative customer collaboration presentation, I thought it would be a good idea to create a 1-minute movie trailer to break the ice and remind you of the Øredev 2008 conference in Sweden in November. So here it is! [...]

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I can easily shed a tear while watching a well-crafted movie. I really do. Someone in my family once teased me, saying that I’m so oversensitive that I would probably cry watching Daffy Duck. There, I said it. Join my close friends and make fun of me. I’m [...]

I have really enjoyed doing some public speaking this year. I’m just back from the DDD Community Event in Galway and, once again, the feedback on my talk has been very positive. I always feel the responsibility of fulfilling people’s expectations, so hopefully I didn’t disappoint anybody. I must be doing something right though: 2 [...]

I’m just back from Stockholm, where I presented a session titled “Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication”. Based on my direct experience, I offered some concrete suggestions of how to revert seemingly impossible (but common) situations in IT projects using a combination of agility, effective communication and deliberate creativity. All [...]

I get a lot of ideas on my way to the office, while on my motorbike. Perhaps Dublin’s traffic and pollution is good for my brain. Or maybe not. At one of our daily standup meetings this week, someone suggested that I should try wearing gloves and helmet at my desk

As software developers, we love to delve deep into technical matters and write code that delivers value. It’s not a big secret, however, that many problems in software originate with people and not technology. In my experience, the biggest issues arise mostly due to corporate politics, lack of shared values, poor attitude, inadequate communication skills, [...]

Over the years I have used several productivity approaches, from goal-driven/top-down (e.g. Steven Covey’s First-Things-First quadrants) to more reactive/bottom-up (e.g. David Allen’s Getting Things Done). I have also used more tactical approaches, such as the 48 minutes rule, which I always find surprisingly effective, particularly when I know I can work for some time uninterrupted. [...]

A close friend of mine who works as a developer in a geographically distributed team, recently told me, with extreme frustration, that our profession is doomed and it won’t be long before we will all lose our jobs. “We just translate user requirements into code”, he said. “Companies see IT as just a cost, we [...]

I’ll be back to Stockholm in early April, delivering a talk at one of the main IT conferences in Sweden. For such a technology-centric event, it is quite fascinating to see an entire track dealing with the often neglected issues of people working together. We should really give the organizers a standing ovation for such [...]