Meeting: PLUG Thurs, March 10th

[PLUG Announcements]

We have a great meeting lined up this month.

This month's meeting we will focus on Process Improvement which will 
include 4 presentations from Alan Dayley, Joseph Sinclair, and Bryan O'Neal.

Alan Dayley
An experience in Lean Development

The ideas of lean manufacturing have surprising application in the 
production of software. We will review the principles of Lean Software 
Development and then experience of taste of their use with often 
surprising results.

The Essential Principles of Kanban

Kanban is not just putting stickies on a wall. Kanban is not a process 
but is an improvement management technique for any process. Without the 
principles, your stickies on the wall might not give you more than just 
interesting decoration.

About Alan:
After more than 25 years as a software engineer, Alan discovered the 
thrill of the human side of creative endeavors. He has spent the past 
seven years helping people re-learn to enjoy working and creating. He 
has helped many teams and companies embrace new ideas for interaction 
that produce better results. He continues to cheer FOSS creators and 
users from the sidelines.


Joseph Sinclair
Why everything you're doing probably doesn't matter

Everyone in the business world wants to improve the business results. As 
software and software engineering become ever more critical across every 
area of business, much time and effort is being focused on modern 
software engineering process and software process improvement (both in 
development and operations). The Theory of Constraints (ToC), however, 
highlights the core cognitive gap which results in the majority of 
software process improvement efforts failing to materially improve 
results. In this very short introduction we'll cover a few basic 
premises from ToC and one simple step you can take right now to help 
capture material business results from your current process improvement 
efforts.

About Joseph:
Joseph has been working with computers for substantially longer than 
he'd care to admit, but the first computer he wrote software on had a 
whopping 16K of RAM.
Joseph first used Unix in 1989, and Linux in 1995. He has spent the last 
10 years focused on developing software systems supporting 
Internet-scale solutions using a wide variety of distributed 
technologies, including Hadoop, Mesos, Spark, Storm, Riak, HAProxy, LXC, 
and Docker (among many others).
Joseph has also been a champion of software process improvement culture 
since the late 1990's, and has led or supported several teams and 
companies in transition to more effective software engineering processes.


Bryan O'Neal
Principles of Agile Development for beginners

Presentation will go over the philosophy of agile development and 
provide a quick overview of scrum and kanban methodologies

About Bryan:
MySQL DBA, programmer, and general geek.
Currently working on improving the data systems for the worlds largest 
authoritative DNS representing ~30% of the worlds domains and one of the 
worlds largest certificate authority representing ~25% of the worlds PKI.

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The meeting will start at 7pm at The Desert Breeze Substation.  People 
start arriving as early as 6pm, so if you would like to help setup 
and/or chat for a while, arrive a little early.

We go for food/discussion afterward the meeting to BJs at the nearby mall.

Meeting Location:
Desert Breeze Substation
251 North Desert Breeze Blvd
Chandler, AZ 85226

The Desert Breeze Substation is on Chandler Blvd and Desert Breeze Blvd, 
which is half way between McClintock and Rural.  It is very close
to both the south 202 and 101 freeways.  Public transportation is
available into the late hours.

See http://phxlinux.org/meetings/14-east-valley-meeting.html for a map 
and other info.

See you there,
Brian Cluff