Over that time, I’ve taken my experiences on awesome teams and tried to spread the love as a Professional Scrum Trainer both in the technical aspects (PSD), the fundamentals (PSF), and the organizational through coaching.  I tried my hand at organizing conferences like Cincy Day of Agile and Southwest Ohio GiveCamp with other awesome community members.  I started Cincy Clean Coders (soon to spread to Dayton, shhh) and organized a Code Retreat with the awesome Mark Haskamp.  Interwoven in all of that is about a presentation per month and normal client duties.

Not sure how my wife survived it

The clear theme in all of that is teaching or, at least, the distribution of shoddy advise.  It’s certainly something I feel confident in and have had some success doing.  I highly recommend everyone make it a focus for some period in their life.  It’s had a significant impact.

Some get into technical teaching as an end goal.  It’s a challenging, dynamic, and worthy objective.  It is not an end game for me.  It’s a skill.  Providing answers is easy, guiding and enabling is really hard.  So hard that the vast majority of leaders, those paid many hundreds of thousands & millions of dollars are terribly inept in the art.

Big News!

A few months ago my wife and I found out that our plans for a 3rd infliction on this world would instead be both 3 and 4.  Yes, twins.  Someone told me shortly after finding out “if you want to hear God laugh, tell him¹ your plans.” 

With this amazing and scary news, some lofty personal objectives for this year needed adjusting.  Certainly a big year, but different.

I fully anticipate making a dent in this universe.  I’ve experienced the power of self-organization on certain scales and I look forward to bringing to play industrial democracy in a powerful way in the not to distant future.  I hope this is a significant learning experience and step towards larger goals when it does finally happen.

2012

In the mean time, I expect and challenge myself each day to impart on my children the skills, experiences, attitudes, and dreams to make their own dent.  This is my most difficult challenge and it will take even more effort next year.

As part of this shifting focus, I will be leaving Cardinal Solutions.  While a pretty tumultuous experiment, I hope I was able to enhance the team on par with the experience I was looking for and partially found. 

So starting today I join crazy smart dudes Steve Gentile and Derek Hubbard at the new local office of Applied Information Sciences.  This gets me much closer to home much more often.  I’ll have a chance to ship some amazing things like their recent Vogue Archive and I can get back to teaching in the context of shipping a bit more frequently.  Anything else is simply not worth the effort.

I still expect to be involved with Scrum.org, but I will likely not be providing much formal, external training. I expect to bring this to AIS as time progresses and I get better footing.

I look forward to putting to the test and good use the empowerment and entrepreneurial spirit AIS offers and expects of their people.  I certainly feel that having a long debate with AIS President Tom O’Connell during my interview had a big impact on my decision to join AIS.

¹ While I have no proof, through observing the behavior of the men and women in my family on Sunday’s I’ve come to the conclusion that God most certainly is male.

I’m still working on my side project, hoping to have it completed in the next few weeks or so.  I lost focus with all the holiday excitement, but I’ve picked back up again. 

I’ll also be giving another WPF presentation for the Dayton .Net Developers Group.  This one will be more in-depth than my CONDG presentation which focused on some of the basics of templates, styles, and binding.  One of the big spots in this new version of the presentation will be implementing the MVC pattern within WPF.  Very cool.

We went with a “Little Tikes” theme.

Rickie is quite the artist. 

We wanted Rick to feel special, so we gave him his very own POS!

 Meetings are going to be so much more productive now!

This one should be in the Louvre! 

• Publish my experiences on learning the IronPython and Scheme languages.
• Run 9 miles per week.
• Lift 3x a week.
• Blog 3 articles a week (bird #2).
• Play basketball 2x a week.
• Read 2 books on the Crusades (this currently exists as “find 2 books about the Crusades”).

Now I know what your thinking, “Those certainly appear to be New Year Resolutions, Ryan.” Well they are not – they are goals. They are goals, because aside from the last three items they are unchanged from last week, last month, and all of last year. I prefer to maintain rolling resolutions rather than one time resolutions that are tied to dates. Some of the best advice: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today” – J. A. Spender