Software development masterclass

Today, my colleague Craig and I taught a Software Development Masterclass – slightly grandiose title aside, it was a good experience!

We took 4 attendees, who had applied through the company website, through the stages of an agile software project. We estimated issues as a team, then ran two 1 hour “sprints” of pairing up with the guys and working on real-world problems. The retrospective at the end showed that we got through a lot of stuff, way more than I expected – the applicants actually fixed problems in applications.

The attendees all had good ideas and interesting insights, and all were enthusiastic, so it was good fun – plus lunch was provided, and I’ll do more or less anything for free food! 😉

We’ll hopefully be running more classes in the coming months – certainly something I’d like to continue to be involved with.

One of the things I enjoy the most is showing people ways of solving problems, particularly through paired programming – finding out where people are at, sitting with them for a bit and gauging what could be useful to them, and then helping them learn to work more efficiently or more securely and so forth. I hope to get better at this – I would love to become a good teacher. My mother is a teacher, and my father has given a lot of training over the years and I’ve always seen teaching as an incredibly rewarding thing. I’ve taught bass before, taught from the Bible a few times, and I do a lot of tech meetings and training at work and of course co-organise Unified Diff but I do feel it’s something that I really want to do well. I want to pass on information, get people thinking, and to help people to grow – it sounds a bit syrupy when I put it like that but it’s the truth! I’ve been fortunate enough to work with great people and learn a lot and I absolutely do not want to sit on that like some kind of “knowledge kestrel” nesting on a “thinky egg”.

If you’d like to attend a masterclass, or get some tips on running one yourself, get in touch!