I don’t say things like that lightly. I mean, I’m one of those grumbly old jaded “get offa my lawn, you!” people who has been working and building things on the web for a really long time (18 freaking years, if you’re counting at home). I’ve kept my distance from discussion/Q&A forums and listservs in recent years for a few reasons, boiled down to these: a lot of people are jerks, and a lot of people don’t even try to help themselves—both of these factors just waste everyone’s time, effort, and goodwill, and those are things I let affect me far more than I should.

But given the new year (always a good time to start new things), time on my hands after quitting my job, and a deep desire to get back to my roots (firmly planted outside of academia), I decided to commit time to becoming a good community member at StackExchange. Since I follow both Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) on Twitter and have read/enjoyed/learned from each of their blogs for a long time, I figured if there was going to be any network that I embedded myself within, it was going to be one that they started.

I joined StackExchange on January 5th, and although I got a positive gut feeling immediately, I wanted to achieve the following goals before calling it “good”:

• Focus my efforts within a small number of communities, matching the areas in which I have the most expertise and get the greatest enjoyment. With more than 80 Q&A sites, which cover many topics of interest to me and in which I have experience, this was no small feat. I settled on StackOverflow, Programmers SE, User Experience SE, and Project Management SE.
• Follow and commit to the success of nascent sites in Area 51, the StackExchange staging area. I am following three proposals in the “define” stage (Presentations, Business Analysis, and Product Management) and am committed to four in the “commit” stage (Technology Recommendations, Management and Leadership, and The Workplace).
• Achieve the Enthusiast badge on each of my four target sites; this badge is awarded for visiting the site for 30 consecutive days.
• Achieve the Deputy badge on at least StackOverflow; this badge is awarded for raising 80 helpful flags for the moderators. Flags are primarily raised when questions are off-topic per each site’s FAQ, are too localized, are too broad, or otherwise need moderator help. Raising flags is one way I contribute to the smooth operation of each community, without the reputation to do more things like vote to close questions. (I actually have the Deputy badge on SO and Programmers SE.)
• Edit, tag, re-tag, and otherwise help out questions where I can, so that they are easier for people to find, understand, and answer.
• Gain at least 200 reputation in each of my four target sites, so that my “combined flair” badge (see sidebar) shows my commitment to each.

I did all of those things, and I am happy to say that my gut instinct was correct. This network is full of serious win, and it starts with the underlying Theory of Moderation plus the core rules of etiquette: be nice and be honest, civility rules, and rudeness is not tolerated.

I’ve read a lot of questions and answers (and posted my own), both in the main and meta sites for each community, and without fail the discourse is remarkably positive, helpful, and in accordance with the operating principles. The nastiest comment I’ve seen (which is to say, it is not nasty at all) would probably be a user providing a link to the most excellent “What Have You Tried?” post by Matt Gemmell, which is (to my mind) a much more constructive answer for a newbie than giving them something to copy and paste that they still won’t understand.

It’s so refreshing not to have to fight through a layer of crap just to help someone out, or to learn from others. Reputation is not something to mess with; it works. Reputation on the network is a measurement of the quality of your questions and answers, the skill with which you communicate information to the community, and how much that community trusts you. The more reputation you earn—and you earn reputation and badges independently of each site—the more privileges you get. The more privileges you get, the more you can help shape (and hold together, when necessary) the community. It’s such a simple concept, yet so very powerful. I know there are other sites based on reputation or points-driven privileges, but I’ve not experienced a situation before my 41 days with StackExchange in which it worked so smoothly and consistently, especially across different sites with their own nuanced FAQs and different moderators (and user bases). This says a lot about the community managers, moderators, and members, across the board.

I spend most of my brainpower reading, responding, and otherwise participating on Programmers SE and UX SE, and I am especially taken by the community at Programmers SE. This has to be a very difficult site to moderate, and there was recently an election to fill moderators slots (I was happy to have reputation enough to vote)—I do not envy the moderators their role, and I am deeply appreciative of the time and effort of all the moderators. It seems that Programmers SE has a history of being a dumping ground for stuff that didn’t fit at StackOverflow, but didn’t otherwise have a home. Despite having what is (to me) a pretty clear list of what is/is not on topic, an enormous number of questions are migrated to Programmers or asked, and are immediately closed. It looks bad to an outsider, I can imagine, but this site has a talented core community of people asking and answering conceptual questions about software development (broadly defined), and who is dedicated to staying on target.

In the sidebar of my website, in the box that includes my StackExchange flair, I have a note that says “Find a StackExchange site that appeals to you, and jump in,” and I really hope you do. It’s not all technical stuff, either—for instance, there’s a SE for English Language & Usage for all you language nerds (and I know a lot of them!), and there’s one for Cooking. I’m telling you, it’s a good list.

Not a day goes by that I don’t read a question and think “Patrick could really go to town on that question” or “Joe would be all over that question at UX SE”, or “No one ever introduce Adam to the Programmers or Mathematics or GIS SE, because he would never leave the Internet“. Also, I know a lot of people in higher ed (and related) who make mention of project management but perhaps have not been exposed to the actual profession, its norms, and its communities of practice; there’s a Project Management SE that is in beta—it could use more members and more questions.

One final note on how useful StackOverflow is to me, personally: it reminds me of the core audience I’m focused on teaching when writing all of my books. As I wrote in “Tech Books: Not Dead!”, my target audience is the absolute beginner. Boy howdy are there a lot of them who post on StackOverflow—many of their questions are rightfully closed as too broad, or low quality (no research effort), or duplicates, and so on. I study the questions they ask, as well as how they’re asking—the terminology they use, the way they construct their questions, what words or concepts they’re missing—to ensure that as I work on new editions of my books, I continue to cover the fundamentals, provide answers to “why am I doing this?”, and give more than their fair share of instruction in context for the student.

So, thank you, StackExchange, for being a great environment for gaining and creating new knowledge. Friends of mine (and readers who are not yet friends), I urge you to participate where you can, within a topic that lights you up. It seems to me that the communities around SE sites are filled with people who are there because the topic is fundamentally important to them, which only makes it a better place for everyone.

Then again, neither does every online learning environment. Do any?

THINGS I BELIEVE:

• Everyone who wants to should learn to code.
  • My answer to the question “Should all majors (not just computer science majors) learn to code?” is “sure”, for some value of “code” (there’s a difference between markup and programming) and in a context that makes sense for the student. I’ve been at schools where “Professional and Technical Writing” is a course required of all upper-division students regardless of major, and were I to teach that again I would spend some time on “code or be coded”, probably more in the context of understanding the “rhetoric of information” than code, though. Oh hey, I just remembered I wrote something to that effect in 2009.
• When someone is “learning to code,” the only outcome of Lesson the First should be to understand what you’re learning and why.
  • The ideal outcome of Lesson the Second would be to understand how what you’re learning is or is not (or when/when is not) applicable in your life and current or future career
• Learning to code (learning anything) requires scaffolding.
• Teaching code (teaching anything) requires careful consideration of scaffolding and when to add and remove it.
• Teaching code (teaching anything) through imitation (type this! now type that!) without context or mentorship (for some value of mentorship: one-on-one, group, virtual, StackExchange or its ilk, etc.) is as bad of an idea as sending someone to France who has sat in High School French class but who has only memorized enough phrases to ask for the location of the bathroom.
• Pedagogy should be rewarded.
• Badges alone, while fun and useful in some contexts, are not pedagogy.

Given all of the above, I find myself in the situation of watching a considerable number of people I know (virtually or otherwise) get really, really excited about Code Year and the learning platform and curriculum developed by Codecademy, while I am really, really not.

I was trying to figure out just why my internal reaction was so negative, and then I came across this tweet by Dan Morel (note that I abhor the use of the word “retarded” and Morel himself said he should have used a different word):

What Morel’s quote reminded me is the fact that there is a not-insignificant number of people out there with jobs like “programmer” or “developer” who themselves don’t actually know how to code; they may have taken initiative on their own (a good thing!) and gone through a tutorial (or read a book, mine included), or took took a semester or two in Java or whatever language, maybe memorized some concepts, keywords, and typical sample interview questions, and managed to get a job as a developer. Or, they were in a position at a organization that decided it needed a “coder,” this person dabbled in some things, they were given a task to do, the task was done (for some value of done, meaning not knowing if it was a secure, scalable, safe, tested product), and they moved up the chain or to a different organization into a developer group and learned that they didn’t actually know development norms. These are things that happen, and they happen more than you think. People in my field have been discussing these situations for, well, as long as I’ve been in it, and I have seen at least one, if not both, examples in just about every organization I’ve worked with.

You may say that these situations are all the fault of HR or hiring managers, or managers in general, and sure, that’s the case in a lot of situations (here’s another plug for not hiring programmers based on puzzles, API quizzes, math riddles, or other parlor tricks). But the heart of the matter is still that there are a bunch of people out there with delusions of grandeur thinking they can code when they can’t. Code Year, and the Codecademy approach—based on what I’ve seen of it at this stage in their game—is not going to help that situation at all.

For two months I’ve been trying to come with a response to Audrey Watters’s post “Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code” that wasn’t just OMG I SO AGREE WITH YOU.

I can’t. Because I do agree with her, and the key issue is pedagogy.

You know what I hope more than anything in the world? That the $2.5M and other venture money that Codecademy got goes predominantly toward pedagogy and user experience. Yes, the interface is shiny and the badges are neat, but no, it is not teaching you how to code. It is teaching you how to call-and-response, and is not particularly helpful in explaining why you’re responding, why they’re calling, or—most importantly—how to become a composer.

I’ve silently watched many people start the lessons, ask the right questions (“why am I doing X?”, “what happens when I do Y instead of X?”, “how does X and Z fit together?”, “how does Z compare to A?”, “wait, all I’m doing is typing what you’re telling me to type?”), and end up saying “well, I just earned 5 badges and don’t know what the heck that was all about or how it relates to [insert completely reasonable things here].” That is not an acceptable outcome for any learning venture, online or otherwise.

Learning anything without context is hardly learning. I wish that Code Year was 2013 and 2012 was “some smart people with good ideas and a lot of money built took the time to build great pedagogically-driven tool to really solve an existing problem for folks who want and need training in this area.”

“But Julie,” you may say, “you’re really into code and stuff. You care deeply about the term and how it’s used, and you care deeply about finding ways to teach people in ways that make sense to them. Surely you can just chill out and be cool with 500,000 people learning JavaScript online?”

Sure. I can be cool about it. I think it’s beyond awesome that 500,000 people want to try something new and that new thing involves code. I was just as excited when I saw “engage the arts and humanities” on Matthew Might’s “12 resolutions for programmers” list.

The thing is, like Audrey said:

You can look at something like Instagram in contrast, another “hot new startup” that boasts some 5 million users and over 100 million photos. You can ask, “how many of those photos are actually crap?” and the answer is probably “it doesn’t matter.”
But when you ask “how many of those 500,000 Codecademy users actually learned any JavaScript?”, the answer is actually really important.

To wit, we:

• go for daily walks
• eat dinner at 5pm
• carry a lot of ibuprofin (it’s kinda like aspirin!)
• wear comfortable shoes
• eat a lot of soup
• watch a lot of crime dramas
• drink a lot of tea
• carry a lot of tissues
• eat a high fiber diet
• love pickles and olives (maybe that was just my grandmother?)
• play a lot of dominoes…AND Yahtzee
• are great believers in daily pill cases set up a week ahead of time

I think the only thing we’re missing is the hard candy in a peacock glass dish, which we shall set out post haste!

What else are we missing?

I thoroughly enjoyed Pearl’s work, despite being in the perfect position to nitpick it to death since I work on Grounds and have held in my hands and read original accounts of the shooting and John Davis’s death courtesy of the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. But there’s no nitpicking from me—just praise, and the fervent desire that you all go take that dollar that’s been burning a hole in your pocket and spend it on this story.

While reading “The Professor’s Assassin” (available as a download from Amazon and numerous other outlets) you’ll be introduced to one William Barton Rogers, the future founder of MIT. This tidbit is important, as the novella is a prequel to The Technologists, a novel that focuses on the first class of students at MIT and, well, a fictional, yet historically-grounded, mystery. Intrigued? The book has its own trailer…and it’s about science and technology…in the nineteenth century. What’s not to love?

sort of interesting note: Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club was one of the only books I read for pleasure during my PhD work in c19 American Lit.

I started writing technical books in 1999; I wrote the second PHP-related book that came on the market (for Prima-Tech which became part of Course Technology which became part of Cenage, if you’re interested), and from that point on I was solicited to write some more, eventually writing only for Pearson and putting out an edition or two of something or another each year.

I never thought I’d still be doing this a decade later. As a developer myself, I knew how I learned new things in the ever-changing tech landscape, and it isn’t from technical books. I thought “who on earth would pick up a chunky ol’ book and sit it next to their computer while working on something?” … my choice of “thickbook.com” as my domain name was meant to be funny, like “here are Thick Books From Which You Shall Learn Things” (tongue firmly in cheek). The joke’s on me, because that income has increased or remained steady each year; there’s been no noticeable drop-off in either the number of sales of my books, the purchase of rights for translation, or the amount I’ve earned in royalties.

I believe the success of my books is directly attributed to the decision I made years ago with the first book, and have stuck with despite the temptation to “do something cooler”: pick an audience, know the audience, speak to the audience and don’t try to do any more than that. The audience I picked was the newbie—because let’s face it, the n00b doesn’t get a lot of love. As the SD Times post points out, and publisher metrics would likely bear out, books rather than blogs/other online content is where the newbies go to learn things because a beginner won’t know how to evaluate/filter material found online and/or because “Bloggers make certain assumptions about their readers, and those assumptions typically leave beginners behind.” This is a generalization, but a common outcome for beginners who Google a keyword, find a blog or some sample code, and implement the sample code eventually come to find it wasn’t the solution they really wanted or was correct, because they only knew enough to copy and paste rather than to understand and build upon. This is not to say that blogs and other online materials are not valuable. In fact, they’re enormously valuable and are precisely how I obtain breadth and depth on subjects once I know what I’m talking about.

Here’s where I will take a moment to play Captain Obvious and note that this is exactly why academic courses in all subjects actually have vetted course materials—a book, coursepack, or otherwise—so that the learner has a solid foundation to learn and build upon, no matter if it’s a composition class or a chemistry class.

In the SD Times post, some folks interviewed saw “virtually no value in books devoted to new technologies, where implementations are changing weekly.” I agree with this statement, with the caveat that eventually there is a point—even with HTML5 (the example given)—when a book becomes useful even if the technology is still changing. My thought, and what has been my publisher’s thought, is that once an author can adequately (and confidently) express a solid conceptual foundation, go for it. If you can’t, then don’t. Pearson’s been a good partner in this effort; some may see it as a bit conservative (“why don’t you have an HTML5 book out there yet?!?!?”) while others get it (“ah, I see that you have waited until more examples of good and creative HTML5 have gone mainstream”).

One last note from the SD Times article—the author points out that the “line between [books and blogs] is blurring as publishers and authors make book chapters available on the Web, soliciting and incorporating feedback before the formal publication date.” Pearson and O’Reilly (the other publisher I respect a great deal, and for whom I would consider it an honor to write anything) are both examples of publishers that have done a lot of work in distributing pre-prints (“Rough Cuts”) as well as going for short but quality texts (such as the “10 Minutes” series) that can be revised and reprinted relatively quickly and easily.

The future is still bright for me, as an author, and I hope also for those beginners who just want a longer, carefully-crafted and considered text they can hold, which just explains how things work—also giving them the tools to evaluate the usefulness of the exponentially increasing amount of professional and expert texts not bound into books (virtual or otherwise) that hit the interwebs each day.

I haven’t blogged much in the past year, but several months ago I wrote a blog post about what I do in my job at University of Virginia Library. All of that is now “what I did,” because I’ve resigned from that position effective the end of the year.

I’m not going to detail the reasons; you can chalk it up to philosophical differences in terms of technical focus, personnel, and institutional organization (and its resulting inertia). These are not unique to UVa or its Library.

A lot of people in the Library (including my bosses all the way up the chain) are very sad to see me go. I am sad to see me go because there are some really great people here and we had opportunities to do some really cool things. In addition to some really smart and hard-working people on my team, I am happy to have had the opportunity to work with the UX SuperTeam of Two (Joe Gilbert and Erin Mayhood); that’s a team I would work with anywhere on anything.

There are also interesting people doing creative and thought-provoking things in other groups in and around the library—Scholars’ Lab of course, but also SHANTI and NINES, to name just a few—but my group never actually worked with these groups on anything in the Library (contrary to the popular belief that I went to UVa to work for Bethany Nowviskie, in fact you could count on one hand the number of work-related meetings we sat in together). That’s too bad.

Anyway.

I currently have no job waiting in the wings anywhere, nor did I when I made the decision that—having given it my best effort for a year—this was not a place I should be working. My near-term goals include developing an income stream of some sort, moving the family to the Washington DC metro area, and finding a way to do the following:

• promote and lead development in open source where possible, rational, and relevant
• inform, train, and generally evangelize the role of UX in the software development process
• adhere to solid project management principles for the good of an organization, a product, its developers, and its end users
• help organizations—especially small and/or technically understaffed—understand software development methodologies and begin to implement something that makes sense for them
• other related things, with gusto

However, the immediate plan is to finish work on two new editions of my books, specifically working on Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache All-in-One, 5th ed. and Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 & CSS3 in 24 Hours…and maybe make an actual page on this site called “Consulting Services.”

Here are links to some of my favorite posts from those times…including their dates of publication so you can take some of the content (and the links found within) with a grain of salt—internet time races on, and all that.

• “Location-Based Gaming for Education: Try Gowalla” (October 13, 2010)
• “Using Picnik for Some Image-Editing Fun” (September 24, 2010)
• “Using Gmail Priority Inbox to Help Filter Your Incoming Mail” (September 2, 2010)
• “A Brief Introduction to Omeka” (August 9, 2010)
• “One Week, One Tool: Anthologize” (August 5, 2010)
• “Consider Revision Control Methods for Documents” (July 21, 2010)
• “Using Portable Applications for Productivity” (July 12, 2010)
• “Using Interfolio to Manage Your Professional Documents” (May 18, 2010)
• “Revisiting Google Docs for Classroom Use” (May 4, 2010)
• “Engaging with the ‘Screwmeneutical Imperative,’ or why I teach humanities students how to code” (April 21, 2010)
• “Asking for Help is a Productivity Tool” (April 5, 2010)
• “A Gentle Introduction to Version Control” (March 25, 2010)
• “A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website” (March 1, 2010)
• “How 15 Minutes Can Save 24 Hours of Stress” (January 29, 2010)
• “Tools for Synchronous and Asynchronous Classroom Discussion” (January 11, 2010)
• “On Writing for the Web” (January 4, 2010)
• “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings” (round 1, round 2; October – December 2009)
• “A Pleasant Little Chat About XML” (October 6, 2009)
• “Choosing a Web Browser that’s Right for You” (September 15, 2009)
• “Working with APIs” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4; August – October 2009)
• “Website Hosting 101″ (August 25, 2009)
• “Using Twitter Clients to Manage Your Information Stream” (August 21, 2009)
• “Getting Started with Google Docs in the Classroom” (August 19, 2009)
• “Integrating, Evaluating, and Managing Blogging in the Classroom” (August 13, 2009)
• “Teacherly Roles and Technology Integration” (August 10, 2009)

The reason I thought about writing this blog post was because this morning I had the opportunity to see some of the folks at the NINES / NEH Summer Institutes for Evaluating Digital Scholarship…not because I was participating in the institute in any way, but because I was on my way downstairs to get coffee and the participants were all working in the beautiful, wonderful, comfortable Scholars’ Lab. I was able to talk for a few moments with some scholars I like and respect very much, and one of them (Amy Earhart, if you’re playing along at home, who—to reiterate—is pretty great!) asked me what project I’m working on right now.

Project, singular.

I sort of chuckled…I mean, ok, I might have chuckled a lot…because I immediately recalled the e-mail I just wrote to my bosses. There are at least 10 different projects that my team and I are driving forward concurrently, and all of them are fun and interesting and intellectually stimulating. More importantly, we’re a development group (I’m including the superawesome Joe Gilbert because although he’s not in my group we work together on almost all of these projects. He’s a hired gun.) that approaches every detail of our projects in a systematic, thoughtful, and critical way. That’s not unique to us, by the way. I know there are people out there (not the author of this post, of course) who are a little unclear on how deeply humanistic basic systems engineering and software development actually is, but groups similar to mine, inside and outside libraries, know what we do, and we know how and why our work affects those it does.

I’m happy to leave the conversations about the evaluation of digital scholarship to others, so I can manage the group that’s building or extending many of the fundamental architectures upon which that scholarship might get built.

Here’s what we do: stuff like the technology described in this nifty poster (“TwoStore : An Akubra-based extensible storage architecture for Fedora”). Ok, that’s a little esoteric, but there’s also the library catalog and everything that entails with regards to ongoing maintenance and improvements (including some cool Library-managed digital collections of rare books, but also integration of discovery services, and also Hathi Trust materials, etc), the open access institutional repository (oh, and here’s a little presentation about that), working with catalogers on a bibliographic metadata editor, coming up with ways to collaborate and solve problems with the folks in Arts & Media regarding their unique needs, and then there’s the matter of this little Hydra Partnership thing, and the multi-institutional Hypatia project for accessioning, arrangement/description, delivery and long term preservation of born digital collections.

So that’s what we do. That’s why I’m not so talkative on the Twitters anymore; many of the conversations I would see every day fell squarely (and incessantly) in the “eternal september” realm, and I don’t find that particularly productive. All of this work? Keeps me busy. Helps others. And believe you me, there’s a subset of people on the Twitters who I do listen to every day, even if I’m not saying anything—librarians, archivists, and a few hardcore groups of engineers and developers who may or may not be “in” the digital humanities but most certainly are “of” the digital humanities. Whether they know it or not, or perform it or not, they practice it, as do we. For some value of “it”, of course.

In August 2009 I wrote a ProfHacker post called Website Hosting 101 which explains what a hosting provider does, how to use it, and what to look for (or, what makes a good hosting provider) such as reliability/server uptime, customer service, bandwidth, domain name purchase and mangement, price, scripting languages and database support, and having a good control panel for host management. Also in that post (and in Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, 8th ed.) I linked to several perfectly good hosting providers, all of which I have used in some way…yet I did not name a favorite.

I’ve always had a favorite, though. Well, at least since mid-2005, when I started using Daily Razor. That’s right: my #1 web hosting provider recommendation is DAILY RAZOR.

[For the truly geeky/curious, for the seven or so years before that, I ran my sites/sites for clients off a couple 1U rackmount servers that I built from parts, which we had sitting in a cabinet at Hurricane Electric. Sometimes I would go visit the servers in the summer just to say hi, and because it was nice and cool in the server room. Still really like the HE folks.]

So, I’ve used Daily Razor for almost six years now. Never had a malfunction, deletion, anything more than a totally acceptable period of downtime (a couple minutes here and there, usually detected and dealt with before I could finishing the trouble ticket); always have excellent and timely responses to tickets. Great price, great offering, great service—everything I look for a hosting provider.

Some things of note for developers:

• Of course they offer standard PHP & MySQL web hosting packages, and the most basic of them all is perfectly good for most hosting needs (e.g. your standard personal/academic/course web site with WordPress or another blogging platform, and/or with Omeka, etc)
• But they also offer basic Ruby on Rails hosting packages for a couple bucks a month as well, and if that isn’t enough…
• They even offer JSP & Tomcat hosting packages (these come in at $12 or so per month but that’s a great deal…if you know you want to run Tomcat you probably also already know that’s a good deal).

At various points over the years, and for various purposes, I’ve had all of these different hosting packages and they’ve been top-notch.

So! There you have it: Daily Razor is my recommendation for a good hosting provider.

This is a relatively new department; it wasn’t fully staffed until I got here in January. As you can imagine, any processes we’ve recently started to implement (e.g. having processes for starting/working through projects) require a lot of training and reiteration of norms and ideals. Within the Library we have several interest groups that meet regularly to talk about current and future projects, possibilities, questions, and so on; one of those groups is the User Experience (UX) interest group. People from all departments and at all levels (from the University Librarian on down the line) come to these meetings to hear presentations and ask questions.

Today I took the opportunity to talk briefly about how we in OLE work with the specific UX folks (Joe Gilbert and Erin Mayhood, if we’re naming names, which I am) in the service of our stakeholders and their projects. Specifically, I discussed what we expect stakeholders (project instigators!) to do, and what we do with that information, how we communicate throughout a project, and so on. These slides are pretty generic (and my presentation was only 15 minutes) but it was another opportunity to get in people’s minds how we as developers don’t (or shouldn’t) just come up with stuff on our own and decide willy-nilly to do something. There’s actually a process!

(The titles of the slides are: functional requirements, example functional requirement, writing use cases (or epics), writing stories, an actual example, writing code, never stop communicating, releasing)

Here are the slides themselves (view at slideshare.net if they do not appear below):