Wrap up From Ann Arbor DODN

I spent Saturday at the Ann Arbor Day of .NET. Jason, Scott, John, and everyone else involved once again put on a tremendous event. It’s one of the region’s best conferences and was absolutely worth driving up and back on Saturday.

I gave two talks and was flattered to be part of a productive lunch-time panel discussion on how one keeps abreast of the huge amount of technology that floods we geeks.

You can find the slides from my “Three Tips to Improve Your Development Process” talk here. Apologies to everyone who attended that – thanks very much for putting up with the system crash I had. (For those who weren’t there, PowerPoint completely, absolutely froze up. Rather than lose five or ten minutes restarting my entire system and trying to reset back to where I was, I just pressed on with the talk sans slides. I’ve given the talk enough times that I was comfortable with speaking to a few things I scratched out on the whiteboard.)

During that talk I made reference to a number of things:

• Shore and Warden’s The Art of Agile Development. Awesome book on so many levels. I’ve adapted my current retrospective format from it.
• Derby’s Agile Retrospectives. An entire book on retrospective goodness!
• Etherpad.com or Titanpad.com. Awesometastic online real-time collaboration tool for taking notes. I use this on a daily basis with my offshore folks.
• Twiddla.com. Online whiteboard. It’s awesome. I blogged earlier about doing retrospectives using this tool.

The deck for my “Leadership 101” talk isn’t really going to be a lot of interest to anyone. After all, it’s 14 slides total, one of which is blank, two being single pictures, one title slide, and the other slides having only one word apiece on them… The title slide has more words on it than are in the rest of the entire presentation. Go figure.

However, I did mention a few things I thought were useful for folks looking to learn more on leadership.

• The Leadership 101 series I wrote which fired me up to do this talk.
• D-Day from Stephen Ambrose. This, along with his work Citizen Soldiers, give you some amazing insight to the generation that fought WWII. You’ll learn about high-level leaders like Eisenhower and mid- and low-level leaders in the foxholes at the front lines.
• Band of Brothers, also by Ambrose. More amazing stories, this time centered on a company of soldiers who were in the entire European campaign.
• Ricardo Semler’s Maverick. Mind-blowing book about how Semler threw out everything most “experts” know about running business and instead empowered his workers to do awesome things.

Thanks to everyone who attended my talks. I hope you got something useful out of them!