Paddy's Bar & Grill

Join pdxMindShare for our October Networking Event, held at Paddy’s Bar & Grill in downtown Portland at 65 SW Yamhill St.

pdxMindshare’s mission is twofold:

1. Help connect qualified professionals with companies in need.
2. Help employed professionals increase their value through pdxMindShare network connections.

Whether you’re a business professional looking for a job, an employer looking for qualified candidates or just simply looking to enhance your career through networking, pdxMindShare is your resource.

It’s AgilePDX downtown pub lunch time again this Friday. This month the starting topic is ALM’s—Agile Lifecycle Management tools. We have regular attendees in this group who use Team Foundation Server, there are Version One and Rally users, and some folks have experience Jira. Does anyone use ScrumWorks? Are there other promising tools emerging?

Some folks believe the best way to manage an agile project is manually—post it notes, flip charts and planning boards on the wall. Some are willing to tough it out with Excel. What’s your preference and why?

Look forward to seeing you all there.

This month we’ll be talking about what we learned at Agile Open Northwest in Seattle. See "Session Notes" at http://agileopennorthwest.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

If you attended AONW, please come Friday. Please come also if you didn’t attend! Those of us who went will try to share the wealth with you.

This is an open discussion on all things about agile software development. This month:

At Renewable Funding, we recognize that a successful agile team depends on the ability to constantly inspect and adapt its practices to changing circumstances and new information. Over the past couple of years, our team has made several notable changes to our process. Some were good ideas, while others didn't work out as well; but we've managed to learn from these experiences and grow as a team.

Several members of the Renewable Funding team will reflect on a few of our "noble experiments"---such as our feature-branching release process and 90-minute iterations---in a round-table discussion that will touch both the merits and drawbacks of these approaches and demonstrate the collaborative effort we use to chart our course.

Description: Effective group learning is synonymous with effective group communication and high performance. Language Hunting is a group learning methodology developed to save endangered languages through the tools of accelerated learning. Willem Larsen, President of Language Hunters, will lead participants in an experiential understanding of how accelerated team learning works.

Bio: Willem has worked in community education for the past 15 years—at the Oregon Zoo, OMSI, Tryon Creek State Park, and the Eddy Foundation Land Trust. He was a founding partner of Cascadia Wild! and a founding member of TrackersNW. Through his work in environmental education and local natural history, Willem came to realize that endangered indigenous languages are storehouses of priceless ecological knowledge, and this led to the development of Language Hunting.

Willem has presented Language Hunting at many Agile gatherings such as AgilePDX, Agile 2011 in Salt Lake, Agile Games 2011 in Boston, as well as being hosted at Agilistry Studios and the SolutionsIQ Agile Training Center.

Willem believes that languages, traditions, and skills are treasures that communities hold as a whole—only by learning together can we create the rich lives we want for each other.

This month, James Shore will join us for an informal discussion of Agile estimation techniques. Options include techniques for estimating user stories, making and meeting iteration commitments, and how to make long-term release projections. Your interests will drive the conversation!

James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes. He led his first Agile team in 1999 and was an early adopter of Extreme Programming in 2000. Today, he focuses on helping people who are willing to make dramatic changes in order to achieve great results.

James is an inaugural recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice and is co-author of The Art of Agile Development (O'Reilly, 2007). You can find screencasts and more of his writing on his "Art of Agile" blog at http://jamesshore.com.

We are an open informal group of Agile practitioners and interested parties. Folks of all levels welcome. This is a small group environment in which you can brag about your successes, complain about your frustrations, and get questions answered by people who understand where you're coming from.

Come and bring a friend or colleague. We're typically in the back room at Paddy's.

This month Adam Light will briefly reprise his Agile 2011 presentation for us over lunch. Adam’s talk “Chasing the constraint beyond the development team” is abstracted below:

Successfully adopting agile methods creates a high likelihood that the constraint in your value chain will migrate from software development to another business process. As your agile journey proceeds, more agile won’t necessarily deliver continued improvements! Unfortunately, systemic improvement often takes considerable time and effort, and your agile effort may be seriously impaired while you work to improve a constraint that lies beyond your control. This session will address methods for identifying, predicting, and responding to organizational constraints beyond the development team.

Come lunch with us and exchange news from the conference!

We’ll be at Paddy’s Bar and Grill. We have a table reserved in the back room from 11:45 to 1:15.

Bring a colleague who hasn’t come before. It’s always great to meet new agile advocates.

A monthly informal lunchtime discussion group on all things Agile.

A monthly informal lunchtime discussion group on all things Agile.

A free no-host open discussion forum for Agile practitioners in the downtown Portland area, open to anyone who can get here. Discussion topics are selected from the AgilePDX mailing list or on the fly as the group convenes.

Calling attendees of the McCarthy presentation on 5/18. Some of us could not attend, and we'd like to hear more about it!

Agile PDX convenes a monthly 1st Friday practitioner's no-host lunch in central/eastside Portland Metro area as an informal complement to the more formal Agile PDX users group meetings (3rd Wednesday).

Come, eat, and discuss all things related (however loosely) to agile software development. We welcome people of all experience levels, from guru to newcomer, and people interested in all flavors of Agile - XP, scrum, crystal, evo, lean/kanban, FDD, build-your-own, etc.

This months discussion will start with a discussion around Uncle Bob’s recent video blog “Restoring the Trust” (http://cleancoder.posterous.com/stub6-restoring-the-trust) as well as other topics related to the recent ten year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto.

Join us at our new location a reserved room at Paddy's Bar and Grill.

pdxmindshare networking

pdxMindShare is a Portland, Oregon networking organization that specializes in connecting qualified professionals with interested companies through a weekly newsletter and a monthly networking event. Whether you're a business professional looking for a job, an employer looking for qualified candidates or just simply looking to enhance your career through networking, pdxMindShare is your resource.

  Join us for our monthly networking event at Paddy's Bar & Grill at 5:30 p.m.

Come join us on Friday, Feb 27, at Paddy's Bar and Grill (SW 1st/Yamhill) from 6-8 pm for Puppet PDX, an opportunity to get together and talk about all things related to configuration management, tools, best practices, and generally how to get to the pub by 4 o'clock.

This is the first meetup. Hopefully we can get organized, get to know each other, and decide on what the goals of the group should be.

So if you are interested in automation, configuration management, cloud computing, and large scale computing environments, come join us for a few drinks and some lively chatter.

Please RSVP by sending an email to puppetpdx@reductivelabs.com so that we can get a bigger room if needed.

[Full details at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/840533/ ] Join SEMpdx at this networking event. Meet SEMpdx board members, network with other Web professionals, and learn more about membership and sponsorship opportunities. Who: Open to all Internet professionals What: networking event Why: networking, meet SEMpdx, learn about membership & benefits, learn a little something about search marketing

It is that time again for another round of the revived Web Analytics Wednesday (on a Thursday) experience in Portland, OR. The event this month will be held in the private back room...