Agile Workers Software, a partnership of experienced developers with open source backgrounds, is growing. So much so that we’re hiring in order to meet the demands of one of our latest projects.
If you like the idea of working for a young, growing start-up in the heart of Berlin, hacking on Android and Linux technology, why not take a look at the careers page on the Agile Workers website.
The latest training I delivered this week was for a client in the embedded software industry who were changing their version control systems from CVS to Subversion. First, I’ll just plug the course content a bit, then say a bit more about how it went.
I’ve updated my business website with details of the course. For the full curriculum visit the Subversion course page. Broadly speaking, the course covers:
In this case, the course was customised to cover certain topics in more detail, in particular the philosophy (because the participants were converting from a version control system with rather a different approach to things) and externals (because the company had another branch in the USA where important software libraries and components were maintained).
The training went well in my opinion. The participants managed to grok the fundamental changes from CVS to Subversion; they all got hands-on experience playing around in sandbox repositories, trying to solve tasks I gave them; and they all seemed very curious, chatty, and generally engaged in the course.
In fact, this last point taught me a little something as a teacher. Most of the teaching and training I’ve done before has been for large companies and universities, places with teaching facilities like large rooms or auditoriums, where I stand at the front of the room with my pointy stick and the participants sit at individual desks. In such cases, it all feels very much like I’m lecturing to a group of students. This time around however, there was no such venue available and the training was conducted in a meeting room (albeit a typically technical one with a projector and Ethernet cables and so on).
So there the participants were, not all facing me like in a schoolroom, but sat with me around a table, more like a meeting or a seminar. I still presented a series of slides, but the conduct of the lesson was much more relaxed and casual. One effect this had was that people seemed much more willing to ask questions when they didn’t understand something. Another (and the really cool one, I think) is that there was a lot more self-teaching going on. When one participant asked a question, another participant sometimes beat me to it and started to answer them (occasionally with one eye on me, as if to ask silently “Am I getting this right?”) Thus, my role there was not so much to lecture them as it was to help them teach themselves — which, by the way, has always struck me as the most effective way to learn a topic.
I think this looser and slightly chaotic approach worked really well. Until now, I wasn’t so insisting on where a training took place. From now on, I think I’ll consider a round-table approach to teaching much more carefully, even when an organisation is lucky enough to have grand lecturing facilities.
As I mentioned recently, I’ve come to the end of my latest teaching course: a semester in Web Applications at one of Berlin’s universities (see my previous post for more details). As well as theory, there was a practical element to the course, where the students divided into teams to produce their own web apps from scratch. I’ve done similar things before, but in those cases I was forced by circumstance to assign the students to work on a specific project. What I want to do here is briefly explain how much more a successful strategy it is (IMHO) to allow students to be largely free to determine the course of their work themselves.
The Web Applications course was eight sessions delivered bi-weekly over a single semester. Each session consisted of a lecture followed by practical work, where the students either worked on an assignment I had given them or developed their web app. By the second session, the students had pretty much settled into their teams of 2 or 3 members. (That was one thing I did enforce by the way. 2-3 students per team works really well, and I would not recommend going above 3.) The university infrastructure was relatively impressive and provided hosting software, databases, project management tools etc. Use of this infrastructure was optiona.
When it came to deciding what application the students should develop, I allowed them to choose both their own topic and which technology they would use to implement it. I figured:
As it went, the choices made by the students were varied and interesting. PHP was the most popular choice (roughly half the groups chose it), but other technologies like Ruby on Rails, Grails, .NET and JavaScript frameworks were also used. Furthermore, while few groups used the University’s hosting services, many elected to arrange their own. Clearly, they knew their own minds.
What I found particularly impressive, even though I wasn’t evaluating the students on this, was their originality and imagination. There’s clearly still a wealth of ideas for web-based applications out there if my students were a fair sample of the programming population.
I’ll leave you with a selection of the ideas to see for yourself (links correct at time of writing):
I done got published as a writer again.
This time around I’ve contributed an article to the latest issue of Linux User and Developer about Kolab, one of the leading FLOSS groupware servers challenging proprietary dominance of the market. Kolab is a comprehensive software package that offers numerous groupware features, including email, calendar, address book, task management, notes and much more. It’s 100% free software, runs on several platforms including mobile, and can be used by large and small organisations alike.
You can read an excerpt here. Try the excellent Kolab user community website to learn more about the software.
I just recently finished delivering a university-level course at the HTW (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft) here in Berlin on the topic of Web Applications, and I’m very happy with the way it went. In fact, I intend to blog about it here real soon.
Before I do that, let me just briefly advertise the course. It was a set of eight roughly 90-minute lectures (list of contents is below) and there was a large element of practical work, with the students creating their own web applications from scratch. I really enjoyed giving the course, and look forward to being able to do so again. Yes, there’s a lot of material, but it could easily be restructured into a shorter form if that were necessary.