The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
In the runup and following the Ruby Conf in New Orleans this year the Sarah Allen kindly pulled together the latest and greatest guides and setup tutorials. This led to a few other posts and links, which I’ve now pulled together here so that I have an easy way to find them, and to point
The university has approved the idea of a software shop run by students with me as manager for the projects they do. I thought this would be a struggle to start up, but they just said ‘Yes, it’s a good idea. Let’s do it.’ I didn’t have to use any of the arguments I had
As part of the MSc summer projects preparation I ran a number of workshops and lectures on agile, evo and kanban related topics. These all went well. Some of them were being run for the second time (agile with Lego and the Evo workshop), so they went smoother, while the kanban game was new. I
Monday sees the start of the next iteration of the group projects with real-world clients that was started last summer. In many ways those projects worked ok. We delivered usable products to clients and we are still working with one of them in ongoing work. What didn’t work so well were the engineering aspects of
I have now finished teaching ruby to beginning programmers in a mixed class of postgrads and first years students. All in all it went ok. However, there are some things that I will do differently next year. Using small jumps each week seemed to go ok. I used lots of images on the slides and
I did a talk at TechMeetup Aberdeen last week on Failure Demand. You can find the slides on my Interests page, or watch the video when it’s up on the TechMeeup blog site. The basics of Failure demand can be found in a a blog entry by David Joyce, and one of John Seddon’s blog
Upgraded to new MCB 13″ so now need to go through everything again. Started wtih ruby (done, alreay there) and then rails with: sudo gem install rails –http-proxy http://proxy.abdn.ac.uk:8080 as I’m doing this at work. I also noticed a ton of gems already present. I’m not sure that I’ll need to use Macports this time,
I found the solution to pricing agile projects. It has been staring me in the face for ages. You see it mentioned by lots of people: Anderson, Gilb, Cohn, Poppendieck, etc. It’s obvious really when you think about it. However, it took Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James Trott to spell out the answer in
The student software factory is up and running. It’s on a volunteer basis with about four or five students meeting twice a week for about two hours each session. Some of them do a bit on the projects outside of this time, but not a great deal as they still have other committments for coursework,
I was meeting with some local developers the other night and one of the topics that came up was how to move from traditional fixed price projects to agile ones. The developer I was chatting with works for a firm that submits tenders to projects, where the clients all expect, and want fixed prices for
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