Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas • GOTO 2015

I think Dave Thomas[0] made some great points recently [1] about what Agile (as a noun) has become and I think it addresses some of your complaints. Note this isn't just a repeat of the agile manifesto, it is him discussing why he hates what Agile has come to mean to a lot of people and it sounds like his grump-level closely matches yours. The jist I get from it is that agile has become an Enantiodromia[2] and has in some ways simply replaced the problems it was there to fix. That doesn't mean it has to be that way, but thats what happens when people take something and create a religion around it. In my company we call our process "agile", but what that really means to us is to do the minimum amount of analysis we can to develop the features that the customer actually wants, and when they realize what they thought that they wanted was not really what they wanted, we can change it without wasting massive amounts of time. If we find that our process is causing problems for the devs, we tweak it. When we find we're not doing enough analysis in some situations, we try to improve those situations. No buzz words really, just what is best for us and what is best for the customers. [0] [link] [1] [this video] [2] [link]

1) Do not attempt to live code. change your code via version control, build small videos, copy and paste... whatever you do... do not try and live code 2) Read "The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter. 3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice) 4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex. 5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... "Soft" or philosophical utilities are just as good 6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important. 7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches: * [link] * [link] * [link] * [link] * [this video] * [link]

> if you're not making an active effort to bill as much as humanly possible for the minimum amount of actual work, you are bad at business. Deep Neural Networks who try too hard to maximize or minimize things will take weird misaligned actions. [link] I won't go into details, but my experience from the past year of trying to minimize the chances of losing my home and work visa has provided ample evidence that this also applies to human mental health. > There is no way to know ahead of time what kind of contractor you are. Which is why any strategy that resembles "fire and forget" is a poor one for anything that hasn't been repeatedly tested before with mostly the same components. It's better to have a process where you repeatedly get visibility into a risk than to imagine that you can wall yourself off from it. [this video]