Attending the Java Oracle Open World 2010 Event

3 days of highly enriching sessions in Oracle Open World 2010 is keeping me occupied in San Francisco. Most of the sessions ending or beginning with Security, Scalability, Performance were sold out. It was tough to get seats for these sessions. Apart from attending Larry Ellison’s Keynote, I attended many sessions. I am listing a few of them here, and once I am back in India I am planning to blog about other sessions in detail on my architecture blog

1. Hadoop vs. Relational Database: Shout-out Between a Java Guy and a Database Guy.  This session focused on few tips around choosing Hadoop and when to choose RDBMS. Very interesting session

2. Mission Critical Enterprise Cloud Application

3. Journey to the center of Java Universe

4. Keeping your options open even if the cloud is not

5. More Best Practices for Large-Scale Websites: Lessons from eBay

 

 

and many more…

Nearly 41,000 developers from all over the world participated in this  event and as part of appreciation, Oracle had organized the Rock concert.  I enjoyed  listening to Don Henley and Black eyed Peas before heading back to the hotel late night.

How British Airways uses Agile

Here is a good article describing how British Airways IT department have started applying Agile methods and have started seeing a lot of benefits. 


Couple of points I liked in this this article include :

1. If you are interested in implementing Agile in your organization, start with a pilot project with a small team
2. Try to employ a coach to help you to begin the journey. They might be expensive but worth having them on board
3. Put people who are interested in Agile as part of initial pilot team rather than pessimists
4. Scale the Agile projects slowly to rest of the IT organization as opposed to scaling it quickly.

Scrum @ Home

Many scrummers have been implementing Scrum practices outside of Work but silently. 

My own example of

* Using  Information Radiators to track progress of tasks at home,
* Prioritizing the work,
* Retrospective with my family, etc.  

Recently I came across few blogs where Scrum practitioners are sharing info about applying Scrum practices outside work. 

Check them out here

*  Scrum For Kids
*  Scrum in Schools

You can also see few pictures of  how Saturday Chores could be handled in Sprints

. Don’t miss reading the details about how Sprint Planning was done, tasks picked by kids, etc just below the picture.

It is fun to see all this and at the same time good perspective of how Scrum can be applied outside work.

Are you getting any new ideas now to apply Scrum @ home ?