Once again, it is my pleasure to present to the hometown crowd here in Philly.
I'll be presenting to an uber collection of Philadelphia area Adobe groups:
I'll be presenting on what's new in the Flex 4, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst releases. I hope to see you all there:
Wednesday, April 28th @ 6:30pm
Wharton's Jon M. Huntsman Hall Room
Room G65
3730 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA
SEPTA: Trolley to 36th or 37th street stations
Parking: Closest: 38th & Walnut
About a year and a half ago, in a moment of overconfidence I sent a proposal to the Pragmatic Bookshelf, the publishing company headed up by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmer fame. I wanted to write a book about my experiences trying to get coworkers to adopt new tools and techniques. Much to my pleasure and surprise, they accepted my proposal, and I've been working on it ever since.
My goal was to write a book to help people who were struggling to get new tools and technologies adopted at their workplace. I wanted to share tools and techniques for promoting change. Or to put it more eloquently by the publisher:
Your co-workers' resistance to new technologies can be baffling. Logical arguments can fail. If you don't do politics, you will fail. With Driving Technical Change, by Terrence Ryan, you'll learn to read users' "patterns of resistance -and then dismantle their objections. Every developer must master the art of evangelizing. With these techniques and strategies, you'll help your organization adopt your solutions-without selling your soul to organizational politics.
As of April 7th the book is now available in Beta format. Part of the deal when your publishers are programmers is that books can go through beta. So you can buy it now, in a package deal with the eventual paperback. Feel free to go buy it… Wait what a horrible salesman I am. BUY MY BOOK!
If the topic sounds familiar, it is. I gave a talk a few years back at cf.Objective 2008 called Selling Professional Development at the Hostile Shop. This book is certainly a descendant of that talk. But I have to say I've learned a lot more since then:
- The people who aren't adopting what you want are not your enemies
- In most cases, you yourself are responsible for your difficulties in getting people onboard
- But this means in most cases you have success within your reach
- Trust is the most important commodity you have in your efforts
I tried to bring that wisdom into the book version. Titling the book was pretty hard, so we called in Meat Loaf as a consultant, and he arrived at the monster title - Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act On Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should. (His original pass was My Co-workers Will Do Anything at Work but They Won't Do That.) It's hard to succinctly explain what the book is about, so we figured we may as well go whole hog.
So check it out, and if you think it would help you go ahead and BUY MY BOOK!
This week I'm doing two stops on the ColdFusion Builder User Group tour. Both are in the LA area.
I'll be stopping by the The Inland Empire ColdFusion User Group meeting on April 7th at 7:00PM on the Cal Poly Pomona campus. Check out their site for directions and whatnot.
I'll also be stopping by the LA Web Professionals meeting on April 8th at 6:30 in Hollywood. Check out their site for whatnot and directions.
I'll be talking about ColdFusion Builder as well as Flex and Flash Builder. I look forward to seeing you all there.
