Workshop: "A Day of Deliberate Practice"

Track: TRAINING: AGILE THURSDAY / Time: Thursday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Trifork 2

How do you develop expertise? Peter Norvig writes: "The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again."

For a developer, deliberate practice means trying new things, trying old things with a view to making them fresh and trying to move from accidental practice to intentional discipline. Deliberate practice improves technical agility through increased self awareness.

During the day we will practice reflecting on what we do, working together and developing software, for which we will be using CyberDojo, an innovative, collaborative, browser based environment.  We are going to have fun - don't forget to bring a laptop!

Keywords: Expertise, Skill, Deliberate Practice, Agile Development, Craftsmanship, Hands-on, Dojo
Target audience: Any programmer (past, present or future) who would like to reflect on, improve and practice their practice of programming

Jon Jagger, Passionate about helping people improve their effectiveness

Jon Jagger

Biography: Jon Jagger

Jon Jagger is a 2B years old (in hexadecimal) self employed software coach-consultant-mentor-trainer-programmer etc specializing in agile software development (people, principles and process), test driven development, deliberate practice, design, analysis, OO, UML, curly bracket languages (C#, C, C++, Java). He works on a no win, no fee basis. He used to be the ECMA TG2 C# convenor. He's had a couple of C# books published. He's married to the beautiful Natalie, and proud father of Ellie, Penny and Patrick. He loves freshwater fishing. River fishing in particular. He lives in England.
 
Software passion: Passionate about helping people improve their effectiveness in this collaborative game we call software development.
 
Links:
CyberDojo project is my baby at the moment: http://github.com/JonJagger/cyberdojo

Kevlin Henney, Patterns, Programming, Practice and Process

Kevlin Henney

Biography: Kevlin Henney

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

Software passion: Caring about how things work and why.