Here is the talk outline:

Programming Java applications is often viewed as less than pleasurable. This perception is exacerbated when enterprise Java frameworks are stacked up next to all the wonderful new web frameworks and methodologies available to developers today. Grails, a Java-based, agile web development MVC framework, may change all that.

In this talk, learn from a one-time skeptic how your team can use Grails to speed up project delivery, streamline maintenance and support, increase functionality and performance, allowing you to spend more time focused on business objectives in your next web project.

If this sounds like something that might interest you, register here!

There have been good times and bad, and many, many lessons learned. Ultimately, I’m proud of the path I took. Through pure stubbornness, I managed to bypass post-secondary education, by working my ass off to learn what I needed to know to get the job done (often after I had already sold it). In many ways, I attribute my success in this business to this fly or fall approach because it kept me on my toes, always learning, always hungry to improve my skills, and always ready to take on new challenges.

Looking back, I know that I went about things the hard way. A wiser, less obstinate person would have gone about things differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

For the last year and a half, I have been working with The Blog Studio. My time with them has been very important to me for a lot of reasons. It freed me of my solitary home office, and got me out into the world, working face-to-face with people again. The life of a freelancer, especially in this industry, can be a hermetic one, and working with Peter, Lucia and Mike was a very welcome and necessary change.

Next week, I start a new era of my life as I leave the world of contract work and venture down a new, exciting path. A remarkable opportunity landed on my lap a couple weeks ago, and enticed me to make some life altering decisions.

On Monday, I will be starting work, as an employee (for the first time since directing cars in the parking lot at the Stratford Festival as an early teen), with Toronto-based Architech. Architech builds kick ass software. They are a team of people who are extremely passionate about building amazing applications for business and I could never make the jump into a full-time position like this without sharing core beliefs and passions like I do with Architech. I’m confident we will have a bright future together.

Needless to say, I’m extremely excited, and can’t wait to see where this new direction takes me.

To download and get more information, check out the user library project page.

What’s in a name?

For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.

Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:

1. More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
2. More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
3. Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.

So, with these objectives in mind, I started looking for words, which related to projects, planning, and organization. In the English language, there are few (ok, none), which are short, memorable and fun. So, I started looking at other languages—all of them.

Kito (key-toe) • is a Japanese word, which means “project” or “plan”. I thought, how ideal is it to use a word, which comes from a culture of organization, simplicity, and structure to represent a project management application?

Lab • alludes to the fact that this is a place, not only where work is done, but where it is done in a consistent, measured manner. It’s a place where there’s method to the madness that is project management.

Now that I have the name chosen, I will be writing much more about the development of this app. Please feel free to follow www.twitter.com/kitolab for updates.

Also, I’d love your feedback on the name/logo!

Let me know what you think about Facebook Connect, and its many appications.

Each and every one of us estimates poorly in our own unique way. Some of us over-estimate, some of us under-estimate, and some of us couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. However, we usually follow a pattern of some kind. The degree to which our estimates are off generally conforms to roughly the same proportions. If we were to examine a particular worker’s estimated task completion time to the actual completion time over the course of many tasks, we can determine the approximate factor to apply to his estimates to find the actual completion time.

The root cause of this predictability is the simple fact that humans are better at being precise than we are at being accurate when it comes to estimates. In other words, we’re quite good at approximating the relative size of a task, but we fail at determining the appropriate scale.

Take the chart below. Here we see an intentionally simplistic view of a worker’s estimated completion time versus their actual completion time.

At a glance, our worker appears to be a poor estimator, as he has underestimated each task. However, if we look at the data a little closer, we can see that on average, he was of by a factor of approximately 1.8. If we were to apply this factor to his estimates in advance we’d see a slightly different picture.

As you can see, by applying his average estimation scale factor to the figures we can calculate a much more accurate set of estimates. Of course, in practice, five data points will not provide a very accurate estimation scale factor, but by collecting this data over the course of several projects we can get a pretty good sense of this worker’s estimating characteristics.

Tracking this data manually would be cumbersome to say the least, but it’s something that a computer does very well. Given the proper tool, this data could be collected behind the scenes with little to no impact on workflow.

It just so happens that I am in the midst of building such a tool. For now, let me say that this will be a web-based, hosted, project management tool. I will be applying my many rants on the subject to creating not only a better tool, but a better process for project management. This will not be another to-do list manager, I promise you that.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I will be posting regularly throughout the development of this tool and I will be craving your feedback. Many, many more details to come. Stay tuned.