NFJS Day 3
On Sunday, I attended Day 3 of NFJS. I went to three talks by Nate Schutta. The first was a Javascript review ("JavaScript: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"). I've always leveraged my Java skills to get what I needed done in Javascript. It's not something I use a lot. So this talk fit my interests pretty well. I think someone with strong Javascript skills would have found this to be a snooze, but that was pretty clear from the description of the talk. It was "just right" for me.
The next talk I attended by Nate was "Seven Habits of Highly Dysfunctional Teams". I didn't enjoy this talk so much. The title and description were misleading. The first item on his list of seven was "Planning the Plan". The topic revolved around how management insists on a fixed date for when the project will end, and how hard it is to plan that. However, that is not a habit. I don't think he meant to say that planning is a dysfunctional habit, and I'm not really sure what he was getting at. For this item, he also spent an inordinate number of slides describing how, despite numerous safeguards, the plan for building his own house met various obstacles. That metaphor was way too extended.
The next item on his list was "Solutions vs Problems" - how the client often comes to you, asking you to build a particular solution. They don't tell you what the problem is they're trying to solve, and their solution may not be the best one. It's up to us to extract the problem, and then help them find a solution. That's all fine, but I already knew it, and how does it relate to habits of a dysfunctional team? Overall, I didn't find this talk worth attending. I'd recommend you skim the slides before going to be sure this is something that's worth it for you.
I also attended Nate's "Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit". This was one of the talks in the last session. I thought it would be a nice way to wind up the day, since I was feeling pretty overloaded by then, and didn't want to think about anything too technical. Unfortunately, again, it just wasn't very useful to me. Most people who pay attention to these things will know the drill already: you need plenty of sleep and exercise to function well, context switching is deadly, etc. Some of the references and links from the slides might prove useful, but after sitting through most of the talk, I wished I'd attended a different one.
The best talk of the day was Stuart Halloway's "Agile Retrospectives". Stuart is a very dynamic and intense speaker, so I stayed pretty alert throughout the talk. He used part of the session as a retrospective about the conference, to help demonstrate how retrospectives work, and to get feedback on the conference. This was useful to me, since I've never been involved in a retrospective, and it may be helpful down the line if I ever am. It was also just useful in pointing out ways to keep people involved during meetings - have people move around, break out large groups into smaller ones, etc. This was all good stuff for me. I was familiar with some of it, but it was a good reminder, and there were a number of tips I hadn't encountered before.
The next talk I attended by Nate was "Seven Habits of Highly Dysfunctional Teams". I didn't enjoy this talk so much. The title and description were misleading. The first item on his list of seven was "Planning the Plan". The topic revolved around how management insists on a fixed date for when the project will end, and how hard it is to plan that. However, that is not a habit. I don't think he meant to say that planning is a dysfunctional habit, and I'm not really sure what he was getting at. For this item, he also spent an inordinate number of slides describing how, despite numerous safeguards, the plan for building his own house met various obstacles. That metaphor was way too extended.
The next item on his list was "Solutions vs Problems" - how the client often comes to you, asking you to build a particular solution. They don't tell you what the problem is they're trying to solve, and their solution may not be the best one. It's up to us to extract the problem, and then help them find a solution. That's all fine, but I already knew it, and how does it relate to habits of a dysfunctional team? Overall, I didn't find this talk worth attending. I'd recommend you skim the slides before going to be sure this is something that's worth it for you.
I also attended Nate's "Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit". This was one of the talks in the last session. I thought it would be a nice way to wind up the day, since I was feeling pretty overloaded by then, and didn't want to think about anything too technical. Unfortunately, again, it just wasn't very useful to me. Most people who pay attention to these things will know the drill already: you need plenty of sleep and exercise to function well, context switching is deadly, etc. Some of the references and links from the slides might prove useful, but after sitting through most of the talk, I wished I'd attended a different one.
The best talk of the day was Stuart Halloway's "Agile Retrospectives". Stuart is a very dynamic and intense speaker, so I stayed pretty alert throughout the talk. He used part of the session as a retrospective about the conference, to help demonstrate how retrospectives work, and to get feedback on the conference. This was useful to me, since I've never been involved in a retrospective, and it may be helpful down the line if I ever am. It was also just useful in pointing out ways to keep people involved during meetings - have people move around, break out large groups into smaller ones, etc. This was all good stuff for me. I was familiar with some of it, but it was a good reminder, and there were a number of tips I hadn't encountered before.
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posted by md at 4:46 AM
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