DevLink is really aimed towards Microsoft programmers. I'm not a Microsoft programmer. I live and breathe Linux. However, the conference had a session on Ruby and a Project Management track, so I figured, why not?
The Good
The highlight was the Ruby/Koans session with Leon Gersing of Edgecase. Gersing has the demeanor of a natural mentor. The class was about three hours long and basically consisted of fixing broken Ruby tests. It was a great introduction to the idiosyncrasies of Ruby. Gersing paired up users that didn't bring a laptop, so I welcomed a native Microsoft developer to work alongside me. At first I was a little concerned that my partner would be put-off by my use of vim, but I was pleasantly surprised that this particular developer was quite familiar with vim. I don't think I'd be as comfortable as my partner was if I was thrown out of my element and into a Visual Studio editor.
The Bad
I also attended a session on Scrum.
Any time a certain development or management approached becomes etched in stone and I hear the words, "If this doesn't work for you, then you're not doing it right" I start to get very, very skeptical.
It got really interesting when the speaker started telling the audience how he would hold scrum sessions while he was running on a treadmill in preparation for a marathon. He explained that his development team "understood." I daresay that his team correctly assumed he was what Mark Twain would refer to as a "pompous ass."
"Don't let your developers slouch," he preached, waving his Agile bible in the air. "If I catch a developer in the meeting slouching, I give them a quick pat," with this he mimes patting a butt, "and tell them to straighten up."
Developers are not elementary school students. If you treat them like such, you're going to make them hate you. If I had a project manager that had the nerve to pat my rear and issue commands, I'm pretty sure I'd wait for them in a dark alley and break their kneecaps.
There are some parts of scrum that I can buy.
Short meetings? I can buy that.
Reporting what you did yesterday and what you plan to do today? I can buy that, too.
What I can't buy is, "If you follow these instructions, all of your wildest dreams will come true." That's baloney.
What I see in scrum is that it allows managers that don't have a familiarity with development to apply a system to a process that's really something of an art form. With art forms, you need some measure of flexibility. Take the good, apply it, but don't get evangelical about it. No process is perfect. If you become a zealot, be it a PHP zealot, a Ruby zealot, or an Agile zealot, then you've lost some measure of clarity. You certainly have no business talking at a conference.
Additional Resources
- Slashdot: Highly Paid Developers As Scrum Masters?
Agreed. I would have walked out of the talk. He obviously doesn't know or understand his audience.
At conferences especially it's important to provide practical information that the audience can take from the talk and apply to their situation.
Zealots do more harm than good in most cases as they tend to steer others away from whatever their so excited about, simply by the vibe they give off.
I'd bet the speaker isn't asked to speak again. (based on this talk)
I ended up leaving it about fifteen or twenty minutes early. I just couldn't take it anymore.