Speaking at January monthly meeting of Agiles Buenos Aires

Last Thursday 17th, the monthly meeting of the Buenos Aires Agile community took place at the MUG. In this opportunity, Gastón Algaze and I have facilitated once again (we don't mean to bore people :)) our session presented at Ágiles 2012: El tamaño Si importa: los desafíos de escalar scrum.

Different from Ágiles, where the talk was time-boxed to 50 minutes in order to fit in the agenda, this time we had a nice 2-hour slot to extend the debate, and drill down whenever the audience required so. 

I am dropping the slides below one more time, in case you have landed here without reading the original post. With not much more to say, I don't want to leave without thanking Adrian Eidelman and Martin Salias, the organizers of this meetup, for giving us the chance to present once again. Thanks!

Agiles 2012 - Size _does_ matter: Scaling Scrum from Fernando Di Bartolo

Y otro año ágil que se va!

(sorry, this entry is only available in Spanish, at least for now)

Como más de uno sabrá, en Octubre pasado se llevó a cabo la 5ta edición de las Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Metodologías Ágiles, en la ciudad de Córdoba, un evento anual que es impulsado y llevado adelante íntegramente por la comunidad, mas allá del aporte económico de los sponsors.

Al igual que en años anteriores, la diversidad de temas que se trataron en paralelo daba lugar a que cualquiera de los asistentes pudiera armar su propio mini-track. La oferta de temas a elegir variaba desde conceptos teóricos acerca de la metodología, pasando por técnicas de coaching, y llegando hasta temas específicamente técnicos como ser aplicar cierta práctica ágil en un determinado lenguaje de programación y/o contexto.

En mi caso personal, tuve la suerte de quedar elegido para dar una sesión, junto con Gastón Algaze. Cuando propusimos la charla al comité, allá por Mayo, no estábamos muy convencidos si era un tema que la audiencia quisiera escuchar, y viendo la enormidad de tópicos propuestos, fuimos gratamente sorprendidos cuando quedó seleccionada. Así mismo, durante las Jornadas, el aula estaba colmada, habiendo gente sentada hasta en el piso.

La charla fue titulada “El tamaño Si importa: los desafíos de escalar scrum”, si bien el título puede ser muy abarcador, el enfoque de la misma estaba centrado alrededor de las tres siguientes áreas: equipos (muy) grandes, equipos distribuidos y contexto corporativo. Para aquellos interesados, les dejo abajo los slides de la presentación, que por sí sola quizás no tenga tanto valor, dado que hemos priorizado imágenes por sobre texto, pero siéntanse libres de contactarme para mas detalles.

Agiles 2012 - Size _does_ matter: Scaling Scrum from Fernando Di Bartolo

El 2012 no sólo fue este evento; la comunidad se mueve todo el año. En Mayo, Buenos Aires fue sede de un Scrum Gathering, en el cual tuve la suerte de trabajar dentro del comité organizador, también junto a  Gastón Algaze, Carlos Peix, Juan José Zapico, entre otros. Este es un evento regional, que va rotando de sede alrededor del mundo, patrocinado por la ScrumAlliance, y con el apoyo de los sponsors locales.

   

¿Qué hay para el 2013? Seguramente mucho. Por lo pronto ya está definida la sede de las 6tas Jornadas Ágiles anuales, siendo la misma la ciudad de Lima, Perú, y si todo va bien, allí nos veremos!

ComunidadProde is now on your iPhone

By using this awesome app, Quicklytics (besides that I know its creator, Eduardo Scoz), we saw that about 10-15% of Comunidad Prode users, were accessing the site via a mobile device.

Honestly, not a good thing if you trying to tiny pick portions of your smartphone, to enter data.. this would be for sure impacting negatively in the user experience.

Given that from day zero, we were announcing that mobile support would come soon, other priorities push it aside a little bit, but today is the day; launching the iOS client, where users can now use to submit their predictions, and also keep track of their rankings, either from the different divisions they play in, and also their custom groups.

Info of the app is in Spanish though, given the target audience. You can read more in the AppStore!

Launching ComunidadProde

Hi!

Time is up, break is over, and the new season of the different Argentina soccer leagues are kicking off!

If you are from Argentina, I am sure you have heard about the Prode game before. If not, let's say it is a prediction game, where you guess if a soccer match will end up with a home victory, guest victory, or even tied.

Comunidad Prode is a site we are launching these days with Matías Rodriguez, so you can play it online, with some slight differences from the original Prode game, in order to make it more exciting. Our major goal is to give room to true fans whose teams are not playing in first division, so we are including all 5 AFA leagues (Nacional B, Primera A, B, C, and D).

The other intention we look forward is for people to socialize, so, we are not only including Facebook and Twitter support (so you can post how good you are :)), but also the ability to create your own custom groups and play your own little tournament with co-workers, friends, etc.

The site was built with Ruby on Rails, not only the front end, but also a RESTful api, that us, as admins, can leverage in order to publish matches results. We are now working on extending this api, so to provide mobile support for end users as well... coming soon!

Habemus Prode!

New World Code Monkeys

I have been recently asked at work to introduce iOS and MonoTouch to other development teams, who are willing to start exploring down that path.

Given that I rather like coding than speaking, when it comes to this :), I just put together a couple of slides, but the main driver was actually to build a very simple app, experimenting some of the different _flavors_ that iOS development provides.

That said, I am sharing the presentation here, and within it, you would also find the github repo, in case you want to take a look at the codebase. Nothing fancy as you might tell, but as for what the expectations were, it was fair enough, and covered so far. In case you don’t have the MonoTouch official tools running on a Mac, and you still want to open and explore this code, you might find this Visual Studio extension by Jonas Folleso interesting.

I would finally like to thank Carlos Paez for sharing with me his presentation at CodeCamp Buenos Aires 2011, his talk with Martin Salias, so I can build the timeline slide...

New World Code Monkeys from Fernando Di Bartolo

GpsPing! has made it to the AppStore!!

Today, September 6 2011, GpsPing! has made it to the AppStore, and it is ready for you to get it... for FREE!!

GpsPing! is an iOS application developed with MonoTouch, given my C# (humble) skills! It is not my first iPhone application, but it is indeed the first one that I have submitted to the AppStore. My previous applications were enterprise-cross ones, for employees internal use, so I hope this time I can reach more users from all over.

MonoTouch has built an amazing community and lot of interest for the .Net guys as well, since using their day to day programming language, they can increase the mobile platforms they can target (not even counting Mono for Android!!)

Feel free to drop any comments below, and I would greatly appreciate that if you get a chance, go ahead and rate it.

Rosario welcomed the Agile Open Tour 2011!!

Another edition of the Agile Open Tour 2011 took place in Rosario, Argentina, with a great convocatory of 100+ attendees.

Sponsored by Kleer among others, and organized by Polo Tecnológico Rosario, this open space event was once again a good oportunity to meet new people, in addition to learn and share experiences from and with the agile community.

There is for sure more than one thing that I can take home with me, but one of them is really worth to mention. Given that my current job situation finds me in a position of having people -developers, testers, clients, etc- understand what agile/scrum is all about, simple things that can drive them to that 'click' are incredible valuable. I like to call that click their 'a-ha moment'...

That is how I have found myself after an activity that Martin Alaimo and Carlos Pantelides presented, where in no more than 25 minutes, the difference between traditional vs agile was clearly put into evidence; period, say no more!

For those interested in the content of it, just leave a comment and will go from there...

Stay tunned with these events at agiles.org!