I have been quiet for couple of weeks, and not because I didn’t have anything to write about, but more because of time management. I have not been leaving myself any time to write. There is no real justification for dropping stories from the iteration but it’s the blogging that always falls the victim of the last minute cut. I really need to carve out time for it, will aim to do so consistently in the upcoming weeks.
One of the events that happened during my silence is the visit of our founder, Micah Martin. I have never met him before so it was really exciting to have him around and to be able to ask him questions.
Micah was here for a week and I wanted to make sure I get a chance to pair with him at some point. When the moment came we decided to just solve a kata. It was really fun, and it probably deserves a post of its own. But in this post I would like to tell you about the Micah's cohort.
The plan for the most of the week was for Micah to pair with craftsmen on the client's projects that we currently have here at London office. But on Friday we were all meant to get a day with Micah and he had a plan for all of us.
The only thing about the day that we knew about was kata presentation, because he asked each one of us to prepare one of our choice. I wanted to pick something unusual, however Roman Numerals was part of my iteration that week anyway, so Jim suggested that I might as well practice that for Friday.
On the day these were the main tasks:
- 30min to discover a design pattern, followed by presentations to everyone afterwards. Yes, only 30 min to study and prepare the presentation!
- 50 min - 1 hour to study a topic and to write a blog post about it (research and write!!)
- Kata presentation
Aside from kata, they all came as a surprise one after the other. And it was quite intense, you really feel the pressure when you know that in 30 min you will be doing a presentation on a design pattern you didn't know about just few seconds ago. Or, when you only have under an hour to research and write a blogpost on an unknown topic.
We all did very well for all the tasks given, and not just because I say so myself. Micah has run this activity a few times and said we exceeded his expectations. Shout out to the London team!
There are a lot of take aways from this activity, but for me the most important one was the observation how everyone was still able to perform to quite a high standard within the limited time. I realised that I need to apply this time-boxing technique in my everyday practice.
Inspired by this, I decided to study one or two patterns in the same manner every week and then to present my findings every Friday at the 8th Light University. I also got other apprentices in on this, so we will all be doing at least a pattern a week going forward. This will also give me a material for the blog post, so watch this space!