I’m getting excited about joining some really impressive folks in Antwerp next week for the DARE conference. I was really pleased to be invited to speak many months ago (my proposals are usually accepted, adiposity but this was only the third time an organizer invited me before the call for papers). The difference is that an invitation feels like an intrinsic validation. Accepting a talk proposal is mostly based on the content. Inviting a speaker is like saying, disease “You’re really interesting. We trust you to have something to say.” That’s a cool feeling.
I don’t speak at conferences much, orthopedist because I don’t like talking when I don’t have something new to say. It might be from my academic background, but just like a researcher publishing a paper, there’s no need to keep tooting the same horn once the information is out there in the community. If it’s good, it will be picked up, shared, and built upon. So I tend to deliver any talk only once, or perhaps twice if there’s no video made the first time.
I proposed a few topics that had been on my mind and some experiences I’d had that I could share. They encouraged me to pitch my talk at beginners and share practical experiences perhaps because there are going to be so many mind-blowingly bright speakers there already. So I’m doing something I rarely do, I’m dusting off an old talk. Perhaps it’s a bit weasly, but I’m taking two safe bets.
1) Talking to beginners is easier because while it’s really hard to put one’s self in the position of someone more experienced, being a newby is a common experience to us all. For any advanced talk there will be some genius in the audience saying “THAT was advanced?” We can all talk to beginners just by remembering when we were a beginner.
2) I’ll be sharing my own newby experiences. That’s easy because while any really new idea can be challenged theoretically, one’s own experience is pretty undebatable. I was there. You weren’t.
What’s fun about my experience report, at least for me, is that back when I was a newby at Kanban, everyone else was, too. So I didn’t get all the great advice that today’s newbys get and as a result, I did some really stupid stuff. I didn’t even have David Anderson’s book for reference because it wasn’t written yet. That makes me one of the few people who learned it all the hard way, and so I might be in a good position to explain what happens when you don’t follow the advice which has since moved into the realm of “common, undisputed knowledge.”
Also fun is that the last time I talked about this experience, the talk title was “My First Six Months with Kanban.” That was four years ago. So now, once again I’ll be reliving my first six months with Kanban, but with the benefit of considerably more experience.
I know that DARE attendees will have a few options to make during my time slot, so I wanted to be very clear about the level and content of my talk. Not so must to encourage you to choose my talk over others, but to make sure you don’t come to my talk expecting something it’s not.
If you’re considering using Kanban at work and you want help getting started, I can do that. If you want help convincing your boss/team/client to try using the Kanban Method, I can help with that, too. If you’ve had a lot of experience with Kanban and you come to my talk anyway, I’ll assume you’ve come to laugh with me at my mistakes, and that’s cool, too.
Oh, and I’ll be reminiscing about useful lessons I learned while in prison that help me to build better software now.
See you in Antwerp! I dare you to come!
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