Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Feedback on "craftsman" activities at work...

Got some good feedback from one of the people at the office on the idea of doing after-hours randori sessions, topics to choose and the last "Craft Day" we did.
  • The JQuery session at craft day was his favorite.  Hands-on technical stuff for specific technologies is king.  More academic problems cause him to lose interest quickly.
  • 40-and-out is very important to him.  Doesn't want to do any after-hours stuff because he works very hard while he's here, and is committed to his family.
  • He was unpleasantly surprised that so few people understood the fundamentals of agile development, specifically of TDD.
  • Real-world stories in a lunch & learn, not contrived.  He's thinking along lines of micro-patterns for mocking portlet behavior - problems with specific technologies that we use every day.
All of these came from one person, but were worth writing down because they're a distillation of what I have heard from other people around the office.  Great food for thought.