Preview of my "Refactor Your Software Career" talk

On Oct 24, 2012, I will be presenting a talk, "Refactor Your Software Career" to the Agile Groupies meeting in Ann Arbor at the Forge. I'll be sharing my journey from stagnant software developer to my current position at Pillar as a software craftsman and agile consultant, along with specific actions I took to get there, and strategies that anyone can apply to improve their career path. I'll also touch on barriers to taking this kind of action and what helps to get past those barriers.

But a key component to my talk will be what I'm calling "Transformative Networking". My idea is that you can simultaneously improve your marketability (raise your skills and experience) and increase the number of people who might want to hire you even while you continue to work at a job that doesn't offer growth or networking.

Transformative Networking involves engaging in activities that share as many of the following attributes as possible:

• creating real value (like volunteering or teaching)
• in your desired field (volunteering is good, volunteer coding is better)
• with others (solo coding a website for a charity isn't as good as being on a team doing it)
• in person (there's no better way to present yourself than by working with someone in person)
• with people in your target companies (if you want to work at a company, let their employees get to know you)

If you engage in activities like this (and my talk will include specific examples of ones I participated in), you can not help but increase your skill sets and get noticed.
 

What is "The Forge, By Pillar"?

If you weren't at Agile and Beyond 2012, you may have missed the announcement by Pillar Technology (my employer) that we will be leasing a large space in Ann Arbor's Tech Brewery, a 1850's era building that started life as a brewery and is now a tech startup community with over 30 member companies. The space, and the activities there will be known as "The Forge, By Pillar".

My understanding of this new sub-brand its that it will a place where Pillar can:

• bring client teams to to a space "away from home" to help them create software in ways radically different than what they are used to, while we provide coaching on principles and practices of Agile, Lean, Speed to Value, and others
• bring clients to show them the exciting way our teams create software to generate business value and, if clients desire, quickly assemble team a of skilled software development practitioners to rapidly build valuable software for them
• offer training courses on topics like: Writing User Stories, TDD, BDD/ATDD, enterprise transformation
• host user groups, CodeRetreats, coding dojos, givecamps, etc

I've found that people often want to start writing software differently but feel held back by various forms of inertia in their company. I imagine The Forge being a place where people can come, individually or as part of a company team, for an afternoon visit, a training course or workshop, or for weeks of on-site coaching and development.

Please join us for an open house on May 17th (note the updated date:) Thursday, June 21from 6-9 pm at Tech Brewery and see for yourself what The Forge is about! (map)