When preparing for a presentation recently I was looking at various presentation tools at my disposal.

Purchasing one of those mouse like remotes was an option. I already had a magic mouse that could do the job. I also had a mac remote with keys that indicated forward/reverse. But by default it cannot be used as a mouse like remote for forward/reverse.

I stumbled upon iRedlite . Just the tool I was looking for to use the slick mac remote for my presentation.

As an added bonus iRedlite is programmable to achieve different functionality based on the context of the application. Also that application context can be changed using the remote.

Thank you tin:b for such applications. They have many more – check them out.

I had the opportunity to speak at the Agile and Beyond conference recently. I loved the crowd, excellent turnout of 650+ people mostly from the Detroit MI area. Everyone was enthusiastic about learning how Agile can change the way they do their daily jobs.

I had a chance to present my ideas on improving how you refactor builds to get better feedback and change the way you work. I was also excited because this time I did a complete powerpoint/keynote free presentation. I used deck.js and the good markdown tweak called keydown. Need to make a few feature additions to keydown soon.(I said it first : A fun project would be make impress.js markdown friendly, like keydown.)

Lots of great presentations – varying form lean, kanban to plain old agile. Excellent facility at the Ford Convention Center, also had some time to see Detroit and also The Henry Ford Museum.

Overall a great experience. Thank you agile and beyond team.

(Ford Convention Center image from agileandbeyond.org )

Returned from Ruby Kaigi last weekend. The conference was held in Tsukuba International Convention Center and attended much of the enthusiastic ruby community(including Matz, Chad Fowler, Charles Nutter, Yehuda Katz et al). Had a blast presenting ‘Rocking the Enterprise with Ruby’.

Of all the sessions I could attend I liked Matz keynote focusing on the direction of Ruby 2.0. Especially the focus on mix-ins, issues with module mixins and list of ancestors. Class-boxes also looked a very interesting concept. Makes me want to use ruby 2.0 now. Based on the timeline discussed it is on track to be released sometime in 2011. (Ruby 2.0)

I also liked the treatment of metaprogramming handed out by Paolo ‘Nusco’ Perrotta. A delightful presenter who can draw great illustrations as well as explain the issues in ruby programming very well. His message ‘Look at source code from projects to learn what they are doing’. Also, he concluded that what works in Ruby works because of its design(metaprogramming, mixins) may not work in Java/C#. So when you come to ruby you may have to change the way you think.

Very enthusiastic response to lightning talks(in fact entries to lightning talks were closed even before the start of the conference).
Youngest ruby programmer(Shota Fukumori @sora_h) who wants to change ruby internals with his gem ‘few’ and babushka by Ben Hoskings were my favourites.(Lightning Talks)

The conference was organised very well, with an unofficial and official party on Friday and Saturday. Thanks to everyone who worked to make this a success.

(RubyKaigi 2010 Staff (by Naoto Takai))

Uploading the beta version of the presentation for today’s ruby kaigi talk.

Rocking the Enterprise with Ruby(Keynote)

Rocking the Enterprise with Ruby(PowerPoint)

Be virtually there!

On the last day I had just enough time to listen to Eric Smith and Eric Meyer from 8th light where they talked about TDD with IPhone.
What was interesting was even while working with this difficult technology (Objective C is not hard but Xcode is nothing but cryptic – XIB files really?) they were able to build iPhone apps without giving up of basic principles of TDD.

They demonstrated their struggle before any tools were available for Unit testing with iPhone.
Couple of tools they mentioned were

1. Google Toolbox for the Mac

2. OCUnit

Something to make life less miserable when building better applications with iPhone.

Very busy even though I started at 11:00am.

Met a number of ThoughtWorkers, ex-ThoughtWorkers(talking about Aslak, Liz, h, Foemmel, Glenn Bernsohn, Naresh Jain) and many people I did not know before.

ThoughtWorks booth is a hit – atleast 25 entries for the free ipod touch.

Met people from Moscow, Israel, Brazil, India, UK.

Met people from different Agile organizations. So wonderful to see so much activity in the agile space. Just proves that ThoughtWorks has been right all along and we can say “We told you so”.

Went to interesting session from Mary Poppendieck – impressed by her speaking
skills. (Hope I can come close to those skills during my talk with Paulo).

Hope to see many more at the Agile Open office at the ThoughtWorks Chicago office tomorrow.

I will be speaking at Agile Conference 2009 in Chicago between August 24-28. You will find all the other speakers from ThoughtWorks on ThoughtWorks website.

My colleague and compadre from my TWU trainer stint Paulo Caroli and Sumeet Moghe will be there too.

See you there.

After Print: Want to attend my session … there is an app for that(Agile 2009 Conference Connection at the AppStore – written by ThoughtWorks)