Services

I can join you as a:

Or a combination of them 🤗.

Technical coach

I enjoy being a technical coach. My style is strongly inspired in the Samman Method, I like to combine mobbing and pairing with the team with improving on the foundational concepts via Katas and Learning Hours.

These are the results of a poll I did run at the time of leaving Sunweb after a year and a half being the only tech Coach in a group or more or less 70 developers. The poll was answered by 31 persons, most of them in developer roles:

My technical coaching usually ends up using a combination of the rest of the elements of this page, which I pick and choose based on the context and the demands of the team that I'm working with.

Trainer

Workshops

My workshops are a mixture of theory and practice where I delve on specific topics:
  • Software Testing Workshop (8h) - What testing is and what I understand as a healthy approach towards it while working in an Agile context.
  • Unit Testing Workshop (8h) - An introduction to the world of unit testing. I explain what a unit test is, the main characteristics, mocking a refactoring kata that requires backwards introduction of unit tests.
  • Design Patterns Workshop (16h) - An excuse to get to know the classical GoF Design Patterns from a C# point of view. I present multiple situations where we discuss possible solutions and, surprisingly, a Design Pattern that's good fit for each situation.
  • Intro to Agile (8h) - An introduction to Agile principles, Scrum and Kanban.
  • Intro to XP (16h) - Two days together and work on a Greenfield project, an excellent way to discover first person the benefits of XP for people unfamiliar with it.

Sessions

Like workshops, but way more practice and less theory:
  • Pair programming (2h) - Brief intro to pair progamming followed by a pairing session with different constraints.
  • Slicing (1h 30') - Quick introduction to User Story Mapping, Spidr and the Hamburguer method while practicing with some exercises.
  • Opportunity Solution Tree (3h) - Explore the technique from Teresa Torres while working on a fictitious problem.
  • Kanban (2h) - Basic intro to Kanban.
  • VS and ReSharper shortcuts (1h) - A quick exposition of a bunch of useful VS and ReSharper shorcuts (the repo)

Learning Hours

Learning Hours are a concept from the Samman Coaching Method where in a brief hour, following the teaching method from Training from the back of the room, we try to learn a specific concept. In the past I've facilitated a bunch of them:
  • Lift up conditional
  • Peel and slice
  • Approval testing
  • Beck's rules of simple design
  • Primitive obsession
  • Law of Demeter
  • Keyboarding skills
  • Refactoring golf
  • ...

Katas

If you'd like to do one of the typical katas, I'm more than happy to facilitate. I leave a list here of the ones I've created myself because they are less known:
  • Git - Kata to play with GIT, experiment with interactive rebase and challenge practices around Git (beware, useful for people who do PRs, not that much for people working with TBD and microcommits)
  • Attack Calculator - Exercise to practice extract and override to be able to test legacy code safely.
  • Load testing - Intruction to Load Testing with Taurus Blazemeter.
  • Trunk based development - Experimental kata to play with TBD and micro-commits (only done it once and still iterating 🧑‍🔬🧪)
  • Scientist kata - A challenging problem which can be tackled with the Scientist technique

Facilitator

Sometimes I help people have conversations, focus or discover:
  • User Story Mapping
  • Reading Club
  • Value Stream Mapping
  • Stakeholder Matrix
  • Team Skills Matrix
  • SWOT
  • Team Assessment
  • Retrospectives
  • ...

Thematic retrospectives

Two hour sessions to share with the group part of the theory around a significant concept in Software development, followed by a discussion of the group on how those ideas could help the team improve.
  • Agile
  • Lean
  • Dora

Consultant

I help organizations improve how they work. Software is important and the way we build it matters, at the same time the culture and the way we relate and organize is equally paramaount. My contribution is holistic, caring for culture, business and tech excellence altogether.

Alternatively, if you have a problem or situation you'd like to talk about, just contact me.