raising money for Raspberry Pies

I built cyber-dojo to help promote deliberate practice of test-driven-development at the team level. It's free (beer and speech), there's no login or registration and there are no adverts. It's hosted in the cloud and, until a few moments ago, its home page had a small donate button to help pay for the hosting.

After hearing Eben Upton's keynote at the Agile on the beach conference I've decided that from all previous and future donations will go 100% towards raising money to buy Raspberry Pies for schools.

Please help publicise this in any way you can! Thank you.

Gus and the breakfast police

At breakfast on the second day of Agile on the beach I was queueing behind my friend Gus Power. Gus asked for two sausages and was told he could only have one. I knew what he was about to say next so I intervened in the interest of trying to keep the queue moving at some speed slightly faster than stopped, and said "And you can't trade one item for another either".

So Gus had just one sausage. And Odette was not allowed a fried egg either - but could have scrambled egg. I thought for a moment and, when it was my turn, I said - "I'll have the maximum I can have of everything please." I got one piece of bacon, one scoop of scrambled egg, one scoop of beans, one scoop of mushrooms, one of those reconstituted potato croquette things, two pieces of toast, two individually wrapped "bricks" of butter, two plastic containers in the shape of a miniature thumb-sized bath containing marmalade, and... a sausage. I walked over to where Gus and Odette were sitting and joined them. I gave the sausage to Gus, explaining that I didn't want most of the food - but I did want Gus to have two sausages.

The point of this story is not to whine about the conference. It was a really excellent conference. The breakfast staff usually serve students which may have something to do with the somewhat draconian rules. The point is that overly rigid rules foster bureaucracy and generally end up self-defeating. The intention behind the rules, to avoid waste, is laudable. But rigid rules and their associated lack of trust in both the servers and the served simply creates more waste. A system like that invites people to live down to its expectations.

Agile on the beach

Last week I attended the excellent Agile on the beach conference in Falmouth, Cornwall. I'm really proud to have been the consultant who provided most of the technical-tdd agile training that has helped create 50 new jobs in Cornwall.

I thought Schalk Cronjé's talk was excellent. So was the one Ed Sykes did. And Seb Rose too. The highlight for me was Eben Upton's endnote. Inspiring. I'm going to visit my old secondary school and see if they want half-a-dozen Raspberry Pies. And I'm going to buy one for myself and put Cyber-Dojo onto it. I ran a double cyber-dojo session at the conference and several teachers said they wanted to run cyber-dojos as part of their course - fantastic.