Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.
David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.
In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.
David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.
In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.
Presentations by David Bock
Hindsight is 20-20 - the Agile Retrospective
Agile development teams should always be looking for ways do develop software better, and the iteration is the perfect tool for doing so. Each iteration we can tweak, tune, adjust, and readjust our practices. So how does an agile team decide what to tweak? This is the purpose of the Agile Retrospective.Your app is done - now what?
After months of effort, your software is done. Or is it? Very few successful projects in our industry are really 'done'... The success of the software often breeds feature requests, spinoff ideas, scalability concerns, not to mention the continued maintenance of the hosting platform, security, data backup, and so on.The Agile Product Owner
Agile software development isn't just about the development team or managers... the customer has an active role too. The customer should be prioritizing the stories in each release, potentially working onsite in constant contact with the development team, and even participating in daily status meetings.Done well, the customer's presence has a positive influence on the development iteration. Done poorly, the customer detracts from the team's focus. So how do you be the customer of an agile team? How do you teach someone to be that customer?
Estimating vs. Guessing - How Agile Teams Estimate Their Work
Estimating is regarded as little little more than 'educating guessing', but so much can hang on the quality of those estimates. With good estimates we can set clear expectations for project delivery, but with bad estimates we can run over schedule and over budget, or worse. We often estimate when we know the least about the work that needs to get done - so how can we make the best of what is potentially a bad situation?David Bock's Weblog
David Bock's Weblog
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I just spent this weekend speaking at the Agile IT Exchange conference in Reston, VA. This was hosted by the same organization that hosts the No Fluff Just Stuff symposiums, but while those are geared more to developers, Agile IT was geared more towards managers.
I speak 12–15 times a year at NFJS events, and probably the number one comment I hear back from the audience is “I wish my manager could see this stuff”. Well, this weekend, they did. the audience was more than 50% ‘manager-types‘, which was perfect for the material. Everything from a gradual introduction to agile management techniques, through practices for hiring, to an introduction to the kinds of monitoring and maintenance needed after an application deployed as a service is ‘done‘.
The good news is that there will be more of these Agile IT conferences next year – 5 or 6 traveling around the country, much like the NFJS format. If you are a technical manager, whether you were promoted from the ranks of coder or find the inner workings of software a mystery, you will find something among the 5 tracks of management material.
Thi blog entry might sound like a commercial; I hope it doesn‘t… I spent 11 years as a coder and manager in a moderately-sized government contractor, and I have spent the last several years teaching good management practices to hundreds of people. The material at this conference is top shelf – exactly what this audience needs to hear more of.
Friday, May 23, 2008
I'll be speaking at the RubyNation Conference Aug. 1st and 2nd in Northern Virginia, the pleasant suburbs of our Nation's capitol. RubyNation is just one of the many small regional Ruby conferences that have been popping up.
I'll be talking about a number of cool Ruby tools (GServer, StaticMatic, and Sinartra) that are ideal for situations where Rails is too much.
Friday, May 23, 2008
. If you're around, stop by.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Saw this on slashdot: iPhone line forms at Apple's flagship for absolutely no reason.
The store is open 24 hours a day, so they aren‘t waiting for it to open… There hasn‘t been a new product announced, and the article even says “most people seem confused about what they‘re waiting for, while some believe they‘re actually camping out for a 3G iPhone“.
Can you imagine walking by and seeing a line forming?
passer-by: “What are you guys waiting for?“
Line member 1: “I don‘t know… But I think there is going to be a new iPhone announced at WWDC in a few weeks“.
Line member 2: “I heard Apple was going to be the first to have the new mobile processor from intel and they are doing a speed bump on the Macbook pros…“
Passer-by: “Cool… I think I‘ll wait too!“
Line member 1: “Back of the line is that way, buddy…“
Line member 2: “We are going to be the first to touch Apple‘s new Shiny Thing!”
I‘d love to point and sneer at the nerds, but in a little corner of my soul I‘m jealous. I wish I had the time to do that. I think thats gotta be fun… a real sense of camaraderie in the line, the local news coming by and photographing them, and of course, being the first to touch an iShinyThing!
Funny, I don‘t see a spontaneous line forming anywhere for people to purchase Sprint's iPhone competitor.