Grab 72 hours of HD quality videos from Agile India 2014 Conference burnt on 16 DVDs (62 GB.) Visit http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#dvd to order the DVD set online to be hand-delivered at your door-step (anywhere in the world.)

tl;dr: Thank you for making Agile India 2014 (AI14) a grand success.

Slides: Several speakers have already uploaded their slides. They are available via http://present.agileindia.org/schedule/agile-india-2014. Rest will upload their slides in the coming days.

Videos: If you like to get a copy of all the videos from the conference, you can purchase the entire DVD set here: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014

Feedback: Anyone who attended the conference would have noticed that the conference doesn’t provide any feedback forms. How bizarre is that for an agile conference? Let me tell you something, asking attendees to fill out feedback forms at the conference when there is so much going on is very ineffective. Have you ever wondered why after filling all those feedback forms or taking customer surveys things hardly change?

At Agile India, we take feedback very seriously and hence we believe in talking directly with you. If possible, we try and implement your suggestion right-away instead of waiting till the next conference. I’ve personally collected face-to-face feedback from over 300 attendees. However we were not able to talk to everyone and as a fall back option, we would encourage you to visit http://bit.ly/1nrjpVn and submit your valuable suggestions. The top 3 suggestions, selected by our program committee, will stand a chance to win an iPad mini or a free pass to next year’s conference. However please read the entire email, before you jump off.

Long Version:

As we are wrapping up the last few tasks from AI14, I would like to take a few minutes and share my reflections on conference and the growth of agile community in India since we started in 2004 (10 years ago.)

First of all, thank you for participating in our largest conference ever! We were happy to host 1236 Attendees from 28 different countries. We had attendees playing 342 different roles from 226 different companies: http://blog.agileindia.org/2014/03/04/agile-india-2014-conference-final-attendees-profile/

For 10 years we’ve been running these conferences and every year the community-feeling keeps getting better. This year, finally one could sense the true spirit of large scale community at the conference. It was not a one person show anymore. Also, it was amazing to see how well folks were networking and learning from each other (peer-to-peer learning.)

This year we got tremendous support from a diverse set of companies sponsoring the event. Many people appreciated that the conference was not only supported by Agile tools & consulting companies, but was also supported by companies like JP Morgan and Siemens. This clearly shows that the industry believes in the agile movement and wants to invest in nurturing our budding community. I greatly appreciate the support from our partners.

Another thing the participants really appreciated was, how inclusive the conference program was. In the early days of Agile India, we were very heavily influenced by eXtreme Programming. But over the years, we’ve tried our best to be more inclusive of other methods (Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup, DSDM, etc.) and frameworks (SAFe, DAD, etc.) We strongly believe that our job is to create an equal platform for everyone, get the best in the industry and let people decide what makes most sense to them, in their context.

As you might know, the entire conference program was put together by a committee of volunteers (http://2014.agileindia.org/organizers/), who are selected via a nomination process. Also anyone is allowed to put in a proposal via our open submission system (http://present.agileindia.org). We got 263 proposals for talk, out of which 64 proposals were selected.

You might not be aware, how much blood and sweat goes into putting together a conference of this scale. Every single person, who helped us with the conference is a volunteer. People who have regular day time jobs, just like you. Our team has spent many sleepless nights starting from June 2013 to Feb 2014 (9 months.) It is a big commitment. I sincerely want to thank every volunteer who made this possible.

We encourage you to participate in this process as well. There are 3 level in which you can participate:

1. Join the Program committee (chairs, core members and reviewers)
2. Share your experience by putting in proposals for talks you would like to present at the conference
3. Give constructive feedback via votes and comments to other proposals, to refine them.

Please follow @agileindia on twitter to get updates. We’ll have a call for all of these (May time-frame.)

Quick note to presenters: If you would like to present at the next year’s conference, start now. Start by presenting inside your company. Then at a local user group. Then at one of the regional conferences. Agile India runs many regional events every year: http://agileindia.org/events Also consider pairing with an experience speaker. There are no shortcuts to presenting at our annual, international conference.

Dave Thomas Keynote:

After signing the Agile Manifesto, this was the first Agile conference in 13 years that Dave Thomas was attending. I think this is special. Many attendees told us that Dave’s keynote was the highlight of the conference. Dave can tell you, how much I pestered him to accept our invite. We always strive to bring you the best.

Paid Workshops:
=============

Unlike last year, this year we got a really good response for the paid workshops. Just the workshops attracted over 300 people and the feedback from the workshops was very promising. The paid workshops not only gives you an opportunity to spend quality time with an expert, but it also helps us to cover some of the speaker expenses and attract more experts to the conference. If you were to attend the same speaker’s training outside the conference, it would cost you at least 3 times more. The conference, massively subsidies the cost for the greater good of the community.

Food:
====

Overall the feedback on quality & taste of the food was very positive. Many attendees commented that they hate hotel food, esp. since it creates a burning sensation after eating. But they were surprised they did not have any such problems. Nor did the food make them sleepy. We know that food is a big part of the conference experience. And hence I had personally tasted and selected the entire menu. So if you did not like something, blame me.

Some tweets from the conference:
==========================

#AgileIndia2014 – an awesome conference and one to consider adding to your must-attend events.

As world conf traveler, I can say #AgileIndia2014 is 1 of world’s top Agile confs;

Leaving #agileindia2014 – what an amazing time! Thanks to @nashjain and everyone else who made it happen 🙂

It’s great to hear “understand the problem you are trying to solve” as a common theme from many #agileindia2014 speakers.

Our team had a wonderful learning experience at #AgileIndia2014. Congratulations for organizing such a brilliant event.

Few other things worth highlighting:
============================

First Registration Slab was sold out in flat 7 mins. This was even before the conference program was available. Trust me, this is unheard of in India. There are at least 200 people who’ve been attending Agile India conferences for more than 3 years and they mostly pay out of their pocket to attend. To encourage such passionate folks, we kept a super-early-bird registration slab. We believe they are a key part of our community.

Experience Reports and Case Studies:
==============================

As you know, this year we’ve focused a lot on getting as many case studies and experience reports at the conference. To further maximize your learning from these sessions, we’ve published all these reports here: http://2014.agileindia.org/program/reports/ These reports will continue to be freely available for anyone interested in learning.

Lightning Talks:
============

Lightning talks were very well received. Many people having great ideas to share. Next year we plan to structure them little better and make them more visible.

Not everything was perfect at the conference, however the attendees did a great job in cooperating with us. It was amazing to see them take ownership of the conference and work patiently with us.

A few unexpected things worth highlighting:
==================================

Different floors: Original plan was to have all the 3 parallel tracks on the same floor, but only 3 days before the conference the hotel told us that the divider in the grand ballroom, which is used to split the grand ballroom into 2 halls is not working. We had to shift one of the tracks to Sigma hall (which was 2 levels above) and move the paid workshops elsewhere. I could see the frustration in people trying to find Sigma hall and move between floors. But hardly anyone complained. They gave us the benefit of doubt. Thank you!

Speaker Dropouts: We had a few speakers (including a keynote speaker) dropout last minute. We tried our best to cover up the slots with something equally interesting. IMHO this is true agility in action.

Cramped Hallways: The hallways were quite cramped esp. during the breaks. We had not expected such a great response from sponsors, when we originally planned the conference. Other than the hallway, we could not find an alternative, central location for the title sponsor stalls. The stalls certainly added to the space constraint in the hallway. But it was also fun to have some ongoing action in the hallway.

Registration process on the first day is always challenging. We had so many last minute changes (attendees swapping names and days) which makes it extremely hard to streamline the process. As far as I’m aware, we embraced it and accommodated all the changes. Our team of volunteers did their best to make it as smooth as possible. Next year we are planning to revamp the whole registration process by using RFIDs and other technology solutions.

Wifi Connection: Internet Wifi connection is still extremely expensive (~ 10 Lakh Rs.) for conferences. So we get it sponsored from Airtel. But there is only so much we can demand when we get something sponsored. Having said that, compared to last year, this year the wifi connection was much better. We had 5 routers and few of them were constantly overloaded. With over 200 people trying to connect to each router, there were moments when new connections could not be established. Whenever we noticed something like this, we tried to reset the route, but all of this took time and I could see some people unhappy about it.

Few things we tried for the first time:

Agile Art!
=======

During all the three evening receptions, the participants created a visual art piece together with the help of Richard Kasperowski and the team from McAfee. This helped the participants to create new connections and build/reinforce the community of Agilists in India and around the world. On the fourth day, we displayed our art, which was a big hit. I saw many people posing in front of the art piece for pictures. Finally, we invited attendees to take pieces of the art as gifts as reminders of our potential to create greatness together.

Book Signing and Book Store
=======================

Every year Agile India attracts top speakers from around the world. Most of these speakers have a track record of writing very influential books. To enable the fan/follower of these authors, we set up a book store at the conference and had book signing events where attendees were able to get a personal autographed book by the authors. Many folks appreciated this initiative. And we plan to make it even stronger next year.

Agile India Webinar Series
=====================

We invited many speakers to the Agile India 2014 Conference. However due to travel constraints or other conflicts, they were not able to make it. However few of them agreed to do an exclusive webinar (Google Hangout) with us. The recordings of their webinar is available at: http://2014.agileindia.org/program/webinars/

Agile India Job Fair
===============

Agile India was happy to host the world’s first job fair dedicated for hiring Agile practitioners. The goal of the Agile Job Fair was to create a platform dedicated for the Agile practitioners to meet their potential Agile employers and for companies to find Agile practitioners to enable their journey to Agile adoption and excellence. We had over 200 people who applied to participate in the job fair. Also we had a total of 6 companies who participated as employers. On the day of the event, we had only 40 odd people show up. This was disappointing. However the 40+ who showed up, really appreciated the initiative. Next year we plan to host the job fair, during the conference itself.

P.S: Every week, I get at least 10 emails from people asking me about Agile India membership. I don’t get it! Why do you want to give me your hard-earned money for no good reasons? The current membership program has no real benefits and hence we’ve closed it. I’m currently working on a new membership model for Agile India, which will provide real membership benefits. At that point you can justify spending money on membership. If you have ideas on how we should structure the membership program, please drop me a note. Good ideas win free membership. Stay tuned for more…

Agile India 2014 Conference was happy to host 1236 attendees from 28 different countries. The attendees belong to 226 different companies and play 342 different roles.

Attendees Role – 342

Attendees Organization – 226

Countries – 28

Gender

The need for an Agile coach and a right channel for coaching has become imperative for many Agile organisations. This forces us to nurture a community of coaches who understand the role requirements and goes beyond the usual to tackle the implementation challenges. Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd are pioneers in coaching the Agile coaches to handle large enterprise problems. Their experience in life coaching and expertise in the industry gives them an edge. They have more than 15 years of experience in leading projects and organisations.

Lyssa is also trained as a Co-active coach and leader. She authored ‘Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition’ in 2010.

Michael is trained as a Team and Organisational coach, in co-active leadership and in executive coaching.Currently he is writing a book called Coaching in the Agile Enterprise.

Lyssa and Michael are running a workshop at Agile India 2014 for Agilists who wants to increase their overall Agile coaching skills, including in the areas of Teaching, Mentoring, Facilitation, and Professional Coaching.

We had a short chat with them to understand their views about Agile Coaching

1. What is the role of an Agile Coach in the Agile transformation journey?

Lyssa Adkins: You know Agile coach is a word that we just use generically because almost every corporation has their own version of these words. They’ll say “XP coach” or “Scrum Master” or “Agile Project Manager” or something like that. And we’re not really religious about which form or the word we use. What we care is about how the coaches help teams move beyond just getting the practices up and running and, into helping teams on their joyful and deliberate pursuit of high performance. It’s really going beyond what we would consider as a basic Scrum Master or XP coach for example.

Michael Spayd: It is, as Lyssa is saying, a pretty broad range of definitions. The word “coach” is interesting too because it’s such an overloaded term. You know, it means sports coach to some people, it means professional coach – like a life coach or an executive coach to some people, and it means kind of you having coaching by your manager which really means telling you what you need to do or you are going to get fired.And that’s created some confusion around what Agile coaches do and a really wide range of activities they do.

We’ve done some writing about that and talked about all the competencies that Agile coaches need to have. But basically they stand in a position or work in a position that’s kind of like a team leader in a certain way and kind of outside the team, helping the team, serving the team, and helping the team become a better team. Not like doing things for the team, not getting and making all the decisions for the team – anything like that, but really trying to help the team become a better team.

2. What does it take to be an effective Agile Coach?

Michael Spayd: Well this is where the term Agile coach is both overloaded and really big actually, there’s a lot of things to do as an Agile coach. So we look to impart facilitation, like professional facilitation and having skill at being a neutral facilitator of meetings and events (you know games whatever it is in the Agile environment). And help leading teams through that without getting involved in the content without voting on “Oh you should do this way” but actually helping the team get better themselves.

The thing that most people think about when they think about an Agile coach is what we call an Agile-Lean practitioner, so knowing about the Agile processes, knowing how the values relate to the principles, relate to and generate the practices, how you innovate, how you modify them in a consistent way – that sort of thing – so all the world of knowing all about Agile and Lean. That’s one big, big piece but it’s definitely not the whole shooting match.

Lyssa Adkins: The predominant role we’re playing now is to help coaches create awareness in themselves of which of those disciplines (we didn’t even go through all of them but we’ve gone through a good number of them) they have solidly and which they don’t. And how at any given moment they will choose which one serves the purposes of the transformation best.

Michael Spayd: So making for an Agile coach in terms of transforming or working with a team they have to draw on this pallet, if you think about this, because coaching, facilitation, teaching, mentoring, Agile Lean practitioner. It’s like a pallet of colours that you are painting with so to speak, and the art of it, in a lot of ways, is which one do you choose at which time to help an organization make this transition.

Lyssa Adkins: We recognize that transformation is about “transformation”. Which means you can’t consult your way into it, you can’t cajole someone into it, you can’t make them do it. It’s a lot about each individual person and how that radiates out to a whole organization. So, in the center of all of those disciplines is this thing we call the coaching stance. Which is very much just like a home base that an Agile coach comes back to as a way to help activate in other people their next positive steps towards the transformation they see needs to take place. And that’s how the results stick. That’s how an organization continues to transform once the Agile consultants have left the building. And that’s an important thing for us. I guess the higher calling of why we’re together is that Agile is this incredible positive transformation virus. It is unleashing a wave of positive change everywhere that it goes. And we believe that Agile coaches when they are well equipped are powerful transformation agents to help that virus spread in a positive and useful way. Not only for people but also for products.

 3. What are the key take-aways from your workshop?

Lyssa Adkins: Well instead of us telling you about the take-aways from our workshops, you can find the testimonials from our participants on ‘Our Impact’ page in our website.

This workshop has limited seats. Book early to avoid disappointments: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#workshops

With the increase in the consumer demand and change in the market dynamics, the number of new products that are launched in our market have increased tremendously. The passion of these young entrepreneurs have inspired thousands of young minds to develop new solutions to new/existing problems. However the success of these products are largely driven by the consumer expectation and passion is only a driving force.

Ash Maurya, a serial entrepreneur is running a 2-day workshop about building successful products at Agile India 2014. In this 2-day hands-on workshop, you’ll learn a systematic methodology, developed through rigorous testing of Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Bootstrapping techniques on hundreds of products, that will show you exactly how to build what people want.

He is the founder of Spark59 and also the author of ‘Running Lean’. Currently he is working on his new book ‘The Customer Factory’.

We had a short chat with him to understand his views about building successful products.

1. What is one important lesson that the large enterprises should learn from startups and vice versa?

Bringing a new product to market, whether at a large enterprise or startup, is riddled with extreme uncertainty. Most products fail.

The key to raising these odds is prioritizing learning around what’s riskiest (not easiest) in the business model.

The first phase of the journey is getting to a business model that works. This can be characterized as a “search” problem where speed is key. The best mode of operation here is the startup. Enterprises that want to explore new or disruptive innovation should model themselves after startups.

The second phase of the journey is scaling that business model. This can be characterized as an “execution” problem where systems and processes become increasingly important. Here the startup needs to mature it’s practices and can learn a lot from existing enterprises.

2. How does Lean Startup help companies to deliver a customer centric product?

The job of a business model is to create, deliver, and capture customer value.

The Lean Startup embodies the customer in every part of the process. All experiments have to end in customer learning and you aren’t making progress until you can demonstrate customer value.

It is through this continuous feedback loop with customers that we break the product development silo and build more products that people want.

3. Your Lean Canvas is an excellent tool to help companies articulate their business model in a simple format. Are there any gotchas that companies should be aware when using the Lean Canvas?

The biggest pitfall with any kind of modelling is falling into the analysis/paralysis trap. I recommend time-boxing business model creation to no more than a day and then shifting all the effort to business model validation using the other tools in the Lean Stack suite.

4. India has a budding Startup culture. What would be your advice to startups?

I truly believe we are going through a global entrepreneurial renaissance which represents an incredible opportunity for all of us.

But while we are building more products than ever before, the sad reality is that the success rate of these products hasn’t changed much.

The odds are still heavily stacked against starting a new business and most of these products will unfortunately fail.

The good news is that a lot of these big bang failures can be outright avoided and instead replaced with a more systematic approach to building successful products.

The number one reason why products fail is not because we fail to build what we set out to build but because we waste needless time, money, and effort building the wrong product.

I attribute the entrepreneurs unbridled passion for their solution to be the top contributor to this failure.

The key is shifting your perspective from having more passion about just your solution to having as much (if not more passion) for your customers and their problems.

5. What is the take away from your Running Lean workshop ?

This will be hands on workshop with part lecture and part  hands-on exercises where you will work on moving your business forward using lean techniques.

The first day will be all about modelling your business into a more more manageable and testable framework. While the second day will be all about stress testing this business model through carefully designed experiments.

By the end of this 2-day workshop, you will have an actionable plan for what to do next to move your business or product idea forward.

This workshop has limited seats. Book early to avoid disappointments: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#workshops

Goals: Learn and practice Agile by doing Agile. Build community. Make art!

The concept: During three evenings, we’ll create a visual art piece together. We’ll create new connections among attendees and build and reinforce the community of Agilists in India and around the world. On the fourth day, we’ll display our art. Finally, we’ll give pieces of our art as gifts to each other to take home with us as reminders of our potential to create greatness together.

The art piece will be a large two-dimensional wall hanging. The center of the piece will be the Agile India logo. We’ll create both the central theme and smaller scale contributions that represent each of us as individual people. We’ll get help from a small team of artists and designers from McAfee in Bangalore.

We’ll use Scrum to execute the piece during the first 3 evenings of the conference. We’ll work in 1-hour sprints to create the piece in three-hour-long sessions. Richard Kasperowski will play Product Owner, Nagendra Kumar will play Scrum Master, and the attendees will be the Development Team. Every hour, we’ll plan our sprint, do the work, hold a review, and retrospect to improve our creativity and velocity toward our goal-to complete the piece and hang it on the wall by the end of the third day.

Here is a small video, which demonstrates a similar art event:

On the morning of the fourth day, we’ll unveil the piece, and it will be available for attendees to enjoy. During the afternoon of the fourth day, we’ll dismantle the project by offering pieces of it as gifts to each other to take home. Thus the piece will be both ephemeral and permanent. The unified piece will exist for only a short time, the fourth day of the conference, before we dismantle it. Small individual pieces of art will live on permanently in the homes and offices of the people who take them home with them, as reminders of the community, and as symbols of the power of art and Agile to create greatness together.

Interested to join us? Apply Here!

Enterprise solutions for Agile have always been a challenge for many organisations. Dean Leffingwell, software industry veteran and creator of Scaled Agile Framework (pronounced as SAFe) is running a workshop at Agile India 2014. This workshop will introduce the participants to the principles, values and practices of SAFe.

His deep rooted expertise and his pragmatic solutions to real time problems have resulted in successful enterprise level implementation of Agile across organisations. His hands-on approach and practical examples make him as one of the sort after expert in this domain.

He is also the founder and CEO of ProQuo- a consumer marketing identify company, and the author of Agile Software Requirements, Scaling Software Agility, and Managing Software Requirements.

We had a short chat with him, where we discussed about SAFe and his experience with various kinds of organisations.

1. In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge companies are facing while scaling agile methods at their org. level?

Primarily, educating ALL the stakeholders to the new process, and bringing everyone to understand the benefits, and the changes necessary to achieve the new common, SAFe/ Lean|Agile way of working.

2. ‘Enterprise Agile’- Is it an oxymoron?

No. SAFe has been successfully applied to enterprises with hundreds, and even thousands, of practitioners.

3. There is a common misconception that Leadership has no role to play in Agile. What do you think is the role of leadership in implementing SAFe ?

In SAFe, Leadership is not excluded. Indeed, leaders assume the primary responsibility for successfully implementing the new way of working. Training is provided to help them on this new learning journey.

4. In your experience, is SAFe more suitable for Services or Product Company? Is there any difference?

No tangible differences. The principles and values of SAFe, and the underlying principles of product development flow, apply in both contexts.

5. Are there any gotchas that teams should be aware while implementing SAFe?

Any transformation of this scope is hard. If enterprises could have achieved the benefits via their old way of working, they would have already done so. Lean, Agile and Scaled Agile change most everything! But SAFe is powered by Agile, so the personal, team and business benefits are well worth the effort.

6. What is the key take away from your 1-Day SAFe workshop?

This workshop is a distillation of the popular two-day “Leading SAFe” course. While it lacks the depth that the two-day course provides, it covers all the foundational elements and is delivered by Dean Leffingwell, the creator of SAFe.

This workshop has limited seats. Book early to avoid disappointments: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#workshops

Dave Thomas is one of the keynote speakers at Agile India 2014. Many of you might know him  as one of the 17 original authors of the Agile Manifesto or the founder of Agile Alliance or the person who brought Ruby programming language to the western world or the co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer or the co-founder of Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Besides the keynote, Dave is also running a one-day workshop about the advanced features of Ruby 2.0.

We did a short interview with him to understand his views about Ruby and programming in general.

1. Tell us a little bit about your first introduction to Ruby? What was your reaction?

I am a programming language nut. I love trying new languages. Back in the 90’s, I’d download languages from Usenet (ask your parents) and play with them—normally several a week.

Back in 1997 or ’98 I downloaded Ruby. I think it was version 1.4.

Normally when I try a language, I stop after an hour or so. Very few are different enough to warrant the time. With Ruby, I was still playing hours later. At the end of the day, I called my business partner Andy Hunt and told him he should try it too.

And I’m still using it today.

2. How do you think Ruby has changed the way we program today?

I think Ruby has done several things.

First, the Ruby community has really lead the way with  testing. Andy and I were among the authors of the Agile Manifesto, and so we helped spread the word about Ruby among the early Agile crowd. In turn, those folks used Ruby to experiment with agile concepts. The result is that the Ruby world probably has more commitment to testing than any other language.

Second, I think Ruby has shown that dynamic languages can be used in the real world. In the early 2000’s, there was a lot of skepticism—sure these “scripting languages” were fun, but to write real programs, you needed grown-up languages with type checking.

Of course, these people were wrong. They were wrong firstly because, at least back then, Java, their language of choice, was effectively dynamically typed—the majority of runtime objects were help in collections, and were untyped in those collections.

And secondly, they were wrong because type checking, at least as they meant it, didn’t really catch the kinds of errors people actually made.

So I think Ruby has made a fundamental difference to the way we see programming today.

3. What are the advantages of Ruby over other programming language?

It makes people happy.

4. After reading your book, Pragmatic Programmer, it changed the way I thought of my career as a developer. Recently Chad wrote another book, Passionate Programmer. How is it different?

Thank you for the kind words.

The Pragmatic Programmer was largely about programming—our advice was aimed at helping developers become better programmers.

The Passionate Programmer is a truly great book because it takes a different, and in a way more important, tack. It is not about programming. It is about  programmers. Chad writes about how you, as a programmer, can become a better, more rounded, and happier individual. Yes, it will make you a better programmer. But mostly it will make you a better person.

I think everyone should read this book (even non-programmers).

5. With power comes responsibility- How do you think the Ruby community is utilising the power of this languages responsibly?

We touched a little on this when we talked about testing and agility. But let’s flesh it out.

Let’s start with “with great power comes great responsibility.” That (I think) is a quote from Spiderman – Peter Parker’s Uncle is giving him advice. And look how happy that makes our hero. He is weighed down by the burden.

So, while the quote may be true, I don’t necessarily believe it is a good thing.

In general, great power is a burden – people with power constantly need to be exercising it or they feel that they are wasting a gift. It is also a curse, because people become scared of losing that power, and as a result tend to stagnate rather than try risky things. It is true of people, and it is true of communities.

So I’m proud of the Ruby community for taking a middle road. In general, I think that are pretty responsible and mature (with certain glaring exceptions :). But I also think that they remember to have fun. They do take risks, they do explore, and they do exhibit whimsy.

6. Are you happy with how Ruby, as a language and as a community has evolved? Where would you like it go?

I think I answered the first part of this.

The second part – well, I don’t think I have a direct answer.

You see, I don’t think programming languages are special things. They don’t exist because someone came up with a syntax, or because someone published a book.

Programming languages are simply tools. They let developers like us solve problems. The better languages help us to feel good while we are doing it.

So we need to be careful to avoid the trap of becoming religious about one particular language. We need to have the breadth to choose tools that are appropriate to the task at hand. Ruby is a particular tool, with strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe you’re a carpenter. After many years of searching, you’ve found a great hammer. It fits your hand, it’s the right weight, it drives all kinds of nails. And then you come across a screw.

There are two reactions to this. One is to say “my hammer is a great tool. Let’s see if I can adapt it to drive screws, too.” Maybe you weld a blade to it, or maybe you grind a ridge into the top that fits the screw slot.

Or maybe you go out and find a screwdriver.

That’s how I feel about Ruby. It is a fantastic tool, and one I still use daily. But I don’t want it to become something where developers say “I am a Ruby programmer.” Instead, I want to hear “I am a programmer, and I use Ruby in many jobs because it means I can deliver stuff better.”

So, what do I want Ruby to become? Anything that helps people be better developers.

7. What is the key takeaway from your Advanced Ruby workshop?

Ruby often seems magic. That’s part of the fun. But, in reality, the magic comes from some simple but subtle underlying principles. Understand this, and you master Ruby. And that’s where the _real_ fun is.

This workshop has limited seats and only few are left. Book early to avoid disappointments: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#workshops