An introduction to the Internet of Things

Would you like to visit Florence? Book for the weekend of September, 22 and plan for another week in which yon can enjoy two great conferences by Develer: Better Embedded and Better Software.
I will be presenting a talk with Paolo (as usual) on the Internet of Things: we'll see how to talk to the world and listen to what the world has to say. You can see all the details of our talk at the official page.
Meet you there!

Physical computing: all around you

Another year, another WhyMCA conference. As always, the organization of the event was awsome, so first of all I'd like to thank Alfredo, Andrea, Paolo and Riccardo (strictly in alphabetical order) for all their effort: I'm sure that the great results have rewarded them well.

As neither Paolo nor I were slaughtered by angry birds or unhappy attendees after our last talk, we decided to risk our already ruined reputation and to give another speech on physical computing. For the lazy ones here are the slides we used:

Physical Computing - Tutto intorno a te

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All the details and the complete video of our talk can be found on the official page of the conference. Thanks to all the attendees for not falling asleep while we walked through the 146 slides (probably the excitement for the incoming mojito party gave a little help). By the way, the hotel staff were only expecting about 20 people, imagine them preparing 200 mojitos for overheated developers!

See you next year - and let everyone know that Alfredo Morresi is a friend of mine :-)

Angry Birds slung from WhyMCA to Vimeo

The video of our talk on Angry Birds is finally online!



All details can be found on the official site. Thanks again to Paolo for putting up with me and to the organizers of the event. Looking forward to WhyMCA 2012 :-)

Our submissions for Italian Agile Day 2011

After breaking the ice at WhyMCA Paolo and I decided to submit a talk for the 8th Italian Agile Day which will be held in Rome on november 19, 2011. Then we lost a bit of control of the situation and submitted three :-)

Unlike most of the presentations we have seen delivered in the previous editions, mainly about technology and methods, which are the expected core subjects of the conference, we have submitted a proposal for a talk about business aspects.

We still don't know whether one or more of our presentations will be accepted; at the moment they're in for the perfection game, in which other submitters and the organizers can give their feedback on the title and the abstract of our talk to help us improve them (or to rule us out).

The abstract so far:

Startup without falldown: strategic planning beyond wishful thinking

Creating an app, even if successful, does not mean creating a startup. A startup serves the purpose of discovering and validating a sustainable business model, so the first thing your financial backers ask you is a business plan.

The best way to create one is to dice a little (the best dice are the multi-sided ones used in D&D as they add a nice variance to the results) and put the outcomes on an Excel file, possibly coupled with a presentation filled with bullet points, incomprehensible charts and never ending description blended with bad quality images.

And then? then you clash with the market.

Luckily there are alternative tools: together we'll see how to combine customer development and the business model canvas to analyze the business and to validate the chosen model.

Read all about our other proposals on Paolo's blog.

A little bit of customer development

After having a great fun at WhyMCA, Paolo and I are thinking of submitting a proposal for a speech for the 8th Italian Agile Day. Up to now we have two or three ideas, but, eating our own food, we should "get out of the building" and test the market to verify our hypotheses.

Up to now, we're interested in a business oriented talk and in prototyping. Maybe Alessandro will join us as well on the latter.

More on this will follow, but if there are any subjects you'd like us to speak about please let us know. If once was enough, or even too much, please let us know as well :-)

Angry Birds at WhyMCA

Today Paolo and I have held our speech on the reasons beyond the huge success of Angry Birds.

First of all we would like to thank all our attendees, that decided to spend an hour of their time with us. Too often we only think of what we will say or do in a presentation, and we can easily forget that a lot of people would waste their time if we don't take this responsibility very seriously. We hope all the time we have spent preparing the speech has translated in even the smallest improvement for people who choose to listen to us. The hall was crowded, but then again maybe the other ones were too full and people were looking for a place where they could find a seat and sleep for a while after dinner :-)

The other thanks are for the organizers of the conference, whithout whom all this would not have been possible. They were even so nice as to give us a beautiful t-shirt for free... and I even won a mug :-)

Here are the slides of our speech:

Pattern per un gioco mobile di successo: il caso Angry Birds

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I suppose they are not very easily comprehensible without the speakers, but at least I am told the pictures are nice :-)

All constructive comments, positive or negative as they might be, are highly welcome: help us to improve!

Why WhyMCA

The countdown says 5 days until the revolution, meaning that we only have a few days to finish (and rehearse) our presentation. I am having a lot of fun preparing for the event, and I am learning a lot too, but it is no bed of roses: in the end we have chosen a little less than a hundred images, some of which were manipulated and some others entirely created by us, not to mention all the mind maps made in preparation. Should we give them as handouts at the end of our speech? Slides would not be very useful without us... we tried to avoid the "death by power point" syndrome, but only the audience will tell whether we succeeded or not.

But why did we decide to get in there in the first place? after all I do not develop games, nor am a mobile expert, yet here I am, talking about the cognitive process at a conference for mobile activists. Simply put, Paolo asked me :-) but that would be too simplistic a statement. It's been a while since I first felt that maybe after getting so much from so many engaging speakers the time had come for me to give back a little something as well, but I was looking for something interesting to say. It looks like I found something that interests me, both because it is out of my comfort zone and because it is about games, that used to take so much of my time (well that was before my wife framed me with house maintenance). Maybe it could be of interest to someone else as well.

So, why is Angry Birds such an enormous planetary phenomenon? Come find it out at WhyMCA :-)

Angry Birds invade WhyMCA

On May 20 I'll be presenting with Paolo at WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference in Milano. Our presentation will start from Angry Birds, the all famous blockbuster mobile game, to introduce the concept of patterns in games, loosely following the ideas presented by Raph Koster in A theory of Fun for Game Design.


The abstract: 12 million paid downloads, 100 million downloads, 50 million Euros under the belly. Why has everyone with a smartphone played Angry Birds? Why is it so addictive? How is it different from games not designed for mobiles, and how is it equal to them? What are the patterns beyond a successful game? Do they hold only for mobile? Is finding them an art, or are they reproducible? Let's find out why the answers are hard wired in our brains.

Read all about it here.

InfoQ: Sharpening the Tools

This is a very nice presentation very well led by Dan North. It offers several insights and hints, but I'd like to quote a couple of things.

At a certain point Dan says he doesn't like learning lunches too much, as the fact that you don't commit completely to learning but do it while you're eating somehow implies that education is not important, while it should be part of the job you're (hopefully) being paid for. It is sadly true, yet we have to work with what we've got: it will come as no surprise that I attend all these presentations in my lunchtime, but I found that given the circumstances it's much more effective than trying to reserve a full hour during the rest of the day.

The most important advices are found in the conclusive slide:

• always assume you're out of date
• you owe it to yourself to keep current

So... how much do you know what you don't know?

InfoQ: Danger! Software Craftsmen at Work

I never liked presentations in which the presenter reads too much, or at least gives that impression; this is one of the reasons for which I found this presentation on InfoQ way too long. Furthermore, I think David Harvey takes things to the limit a little bit.

Yet, there is a sentence that I'd like to quote:

The customer is always right, but sometimes they need a little help... and we need to learn about the customer's world.

So there is a real danger here, and it lies within us. Mark the second part of the sentence, because that's the real important one: customers pay us because we provide value for their business, not because we write beautiful code. Customers don't care at all about the quality of our work as far as their business is concerned. To businessmen only business is important, not code.

A word of caution: that doesn't means that we have to be sloppy, for at least a couple of reasons:

• our personal pride on what we do (after all, we claim to be craftsmans, don't we?)
• I know someone will not care about this point. I do.

• customers will sooner or later notice that each and every simple functionality they ask for costs more and more as time passes and functionalities are added, thus throwing us out of their business.
• This would probably be no good, because we would end up showing boards...

I stole that presentation

That's not as bad as it might sound, as the author explicitely asks to do so. Moreover, as its title is "Steal this presentation!"...

The presentation gives many pieces of advice on how to prepare the slides for your presentations
(sorry for the repetition). One of them is that visual is better than text, which is true for presentations but not for blog posts, wo you'll have to endure my comments on Jesse suggestions (or switch to another website of course). And I'll use bullet points as well :-)

1. Have a killer opening slide. Too true, this is what brought me to the presentation in the first place. As Frank'n'Further reminds us, we should not judge a book by its cover, but it is also true that first impressions do count. Should you pick a presentation in a list of ten on the same subject, which one would you go for? Do I have to answer?
2. Use a trendy color mix. Keep a consistent look, and avoid using too many colors. They only make everything more confusing.
   
3. Use stunning visuals. Your brain remembers them more than words. Images help convey a story, and the audience will better remember the story if you choose the right image. Try to have an interesting story, or also the best image won't be of much help. And remember to credit the authors.
4. Get your text. Text is normally bad, so stick to a short sentence or two, keeping clear which is the most important one. Very important, once you have decided to put text on your slides, make sure it is easily readable. I'm afraid this last point is something in which Jesse can improve, as you can see from some of the first and last few slides.
   
5. Use crap. No, not the kind you're probably using in your presentations at present time. Crap stands for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.
   
6. Use video. I dont't like the idea very much, butI'm not a professional presenter so I don't think my opinion counts very much. Should you go for it, preloading your videos is a very good idea to avoid awkward silences, which as you perfectly know are one of the signs that the presentation is going terribly wrong.
   
7. Share your work. Very important if you want to spread your ideas. And if you followed all the rules nobody that hasn't listened to your talk would do much with your slides, so don't be afraid of stealing. Sharing is making Jesse famous, and I'm (very slightly) contributing to the phenomenon. The same could happen to you!
   
8. Recap. Always. Repetita iuvant.
   

To recap, a very nice (and useful, too!) presentation. Shall we win the war against war-and-peace-long slides full of bullet points?

Lost Generation

A simple yet very interesting way to deliver an important message

Every build you break...

Roy Osherove singing in Barcelona, TechEd 07. Pity for the slightly too long introduction.

How to lead a presentation

I have recently re-read (for the umpteenth time) this very interesting post about how to lead a presentation, and I think Gianugo really hits the mark. The only bit I'd like to emphasize more is the topic.