Last week was awesome, I went to Barcelona to run two training courses. Well, one of them was my yearly session at the Postgraduate on Agile Methods at La Salle (Universitat Ramon Llull). The first postgraduate in the world on Agile Methods. I explain eXtreme Programming, together with my good friend Rubern Bernardez, during 6 days (3 weekends).
PMA 2013/2014
This has been my third year at the PMA and it’s been really nice. The selection process for participants went very well thanks to Xavier Albaladejo and so the group was excellent. People have made an endeavor to understand the XP practices and the values behind. Even project managers, people that have been away from code for years, were test-driving the exercises in pairs. The fact that decision makers come to the class and get to appreciate the benefits of clean code and XP is very important in my opinion. Because they can encourage and tell developers later. In the group there were testers and developers too. The different mindsets together were very interesting when facing code. Enriching experience for everybody. Thank you all for this great PMA edition. Special thanks to Xavi and to Quim Ibañez for his kindness and support.
During the week, I gave one of my TDD training courses, this time open to the public. In general, public courses are more energizing than in-house, because people are willing to learn and participate. They have to pay for their ticket or ask their companies and that makes a difference. This time I got to know several members from the Barcelona Software Craftsmanship Community. The level in the training was very high, in fact, it was more an exchange than a teaching session. There were many interesting discussions and retrospectives whilst looking at the code in the projector. It’s been also very nice to meet old friends and observe how they have progressed over the last couple of years. Specially Manuel Rivero who has made an outstanding progress in his career and now let me learn from him.
TDD Training in Barcelona (open to the public)
This experience reminds me my first open course in Madrid in 2010, when I got to know people that are now good friends and that today, run their own training courses on TDD and clean code or lead teams. So I believe that we have started here a wonderful relationship and that we will cross roads soon again. There was magic in the air.
I have to say thank you to my good friend Javier Gomez for all the support and the hosting, as the event happened in Ricoh Spain. In this kind of courses I get to know great programmers that usually end up being colleagues or collaborators at some point 😉
Coding dojo – Barcelona Software Craftsmanship
Thank you very much also to all the folks that came to the coding dojo that we had on Monday evening, hosted by Barcelona Software Craftsmanship, thanks to Manuel Rivero, Beatriz Martin and Jaume Jornet. In my opinion the community is very healthy in Barcelona, congratulations.