The first Clear Measure Workshop was a great success
This weekend we had our first Clear Measure Workshop on CQRS. I will save you my retrospective on the event as Gabriel Schenker already posted his thoughts on that. Instead I will point you to our next event by Justin Self and Jeffrey Palermo on Domain Driven Design which will be held on May 30th (every last Saturday of the month).
In our last event we had roughly 20 or so folks show up, spread across in person and remote folks. We already have 21 folks signed up for the next event. And if you are reading this outside of Austin, please do consider signing up for the next event. Our remote viewers had just as much fun at this even as the in person folks did.
Not yet familiar with the notion of our workshops? Let me break it down real quick. This is not a user group meeting, brown bag, or other slide heavy presentation. Instead we intend to constrain the moderator to no more than 20 minutes of presentation in the front of the day. Then we break into 2-4 person teams to work towards the days goals. We present the days goals in “story form” just as you would be presented by a product owner in a working scrum fashion. It is up to you to mind the constraints of the day (DDD for example) and work with the product owner to get a good picture of what is being built. Not asking questions could lead you to building too much of the wrong thing. So ask questions. Towards the middle of the day we will provide lunch and have a mid-day review of where everyone is. The idea is to talk about the problems you are facing. Talking in real time across teams is also encouraged. We will provide the lunch (in the last workshop we had Chuy’s!). Then we get back at it again. And towards the end of the day we break for a final retrospective to openly discuss pro’s and con’s that you found during the day.
In our last workshop we used Zoom.us for overall group communication. We also used Slack (cmworkshops.slack.com team) to coordinate teams via group chat. And in Slack we enabled appear.in and google hangouts for team video collaboration. We intend to keep the slack channel open so that the group can have good conversation there for long term. A little community building if you will.
If any of this interests you make sure you go find us on meetup and join in! Also, feel free to suggest a topic if none of the scheduled topics interest you. We will do our best to incorporate your ideas.