Enrique Comba Riepenhausen

CodeRetreat events are awesome! I have attended and facilitated quite a few over the past years and it is always great fun.

I would love to see some other kind of retreat coming up though. A retreat were very experienced software craftsmen share their techniques with other crafters.

In this retreat each attending crafter would present her technique to the group in about 25 minutes and then the rest of the group would practice that technique for another 25 minutes. Each attending crafter would have to present a technique and also learn from the other crafters attending their techniques.

As a bonus (because I am a castle lover) the setting of this retreat would be an old European castle.

Learning and practicing different skills is something that motivates me. It keeps me going and doing things.

In today’s society we focus a lot on teaching, but fail to create an environment of learning. That is we show our children at school that they need to pass exams and learn from what they get taught at school instead of focusing on igniting their passion so that they embark a life of perpetual learning.

I would love to create a university where you can ask for the class you would love to attend, the time you have available, how many people you’d like to have with you in class and ultimately how much you are prepared to pay for it.

Then the so called university would seek out the most suited teacher and start classes for you and the people who choose to learn with you.

As a bonus you would be able to give a fellow student who helped you during class part of the money you paid for the course.

The Software Craftsmanship movement is sometimes seen as an elitist (in the bad way of the word) buch of people that are separating themselves from the rest of the software development community. Others say that we are very serious and not close to the people.

This is simply not true.

Most people saying these things have actually never really tried to talk to anyone (this I don’t know as a fact, but knowing how the people that I admire are) and just assume, from within their own positions how some people are.

Today’s idea is to create Software Craftsmanship apparel that is funny and sends some message. Like t-shirts similar to the ones in ThinkGeek with funny quotes or imagery on them.

I actually have a few great t-shirt ideas, so maybe, we at path11, will actually do something like this :)

Happy Sunday everyone!

Today it is a little late for posting my idea. I wanted to do it after taking a shower this morning, but I got caught up in some serious prototyping of a new product we want to launch in path11.

I a good friend of mine (and path11er), Raquel, is totally obsessed with her squash lessons. She will tell you what she did wrong during class, and how that move should be done, etc, etc.

Given I am not a squash expert (LOL) I was thinking that it would be great to have sport apparel (shirts, pants and all the shebang) with sensors attached to them. Obviously these would have to be really small (possibly the thickness of the fabric). The sensors would capture your moves and measure the correctness of them given the activity you are doing.

Later on you would be able to analyze what you have done in your training session and the analysis program would give you advice and routines to improve the next time.

As a bonus the improvinator would give you real time advice while you are in the middle of your training session.

This idea comes from my last (and first) roundtable I was a panelist for ellas 2.0.

So imagine the situation, you have this idea and you would like to make a business out of it. The first thing you do is prepare a business plan and some sort of market research to see if that idea will be accepted in a market that doesn’t know anything about that idea you have or that it needs it. Once you have done that you go and try talking to investors to get some money to get that idea going, right?

Wrong! (I would not give you my money)

So the idea is to make a one week event in which you will have people with ideas pitch these to you first.

Then the team (which is made of good software craftsmen with development and business knowledge) will select the nicest idea; the one that seems, based on their experience to be the one with the best chances to catch on in the market.

Once a group is selected they will form a team and work for one week on the idea to get the prototype out there in the market to validate that idea.

The most important part of your business is not the business plan; you have to have a product or service that is working, so that people and investors can play with it and you can start validating the idea as fast as you can.