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You've found the permanent distribution site for LightningInterviews by WardCunningham. These five to ten minute videos feature Ward's friends describing their current interests and how they have developed.

Today I'm only distributing low-resolution downloads. Medium-resolution streaming video can be found on YouTube:

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In the comfort of Ward's home, JeffMcKenna reflects on his technical and personal growth culminating in his current position as a Serena Fellow.

Questions for Jeff:
  • What is it like being a Serena Fellow?
  • How do you overcome fear when beyond your normal limits?
  • Are the good things that happen different now that you're older?
  • What advice do you have for young geeks charting a course like yours?

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Community of practice researcher JohnSmith visits AboutUs with a draft of his forthcoming book, Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. John describes methods he and co-authors EtienneWenger and NancyWhite used to see deeply into everyday communities enabled by new and pervasive communications technology.

Questions for John:

  • Is your new book a practical or theoretical work?
  • You observe community leaders over time, why?
  • How can you study a group made whole by the invisible?
  • What does a tech steward do beside technology?

Related sites:

Extreme programming gurus, RonJeffries and ChetHendrickson stepped out of the PNSQC conference for lunch at AboutUs. We discussed incremental development and especially recognizing and avoiding technical debt.

Questions for Chet and Ron:

  • How can we understand technical debt?
  • Do we have any choice in when we refactor?
  • Why is technical debt harder to describe than wine or stereo?
  • Do I get the whiff of a book on this subject?

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BillKayser and his New Relic colleaues commune with AboutUs developers on a regular basis as we grow our respective companies. We love their innovation. Bill and I talk about where that comes from.

Questions for Bill:

  • How did you get from consulting to monitoring servers?
  • How do you extract meaning from measurements?
  • Where does your insight come from?
  • What's next in your career? Fun?

Related sites:

MichaelMehaffy, a long time colleague of ChristopherAlexander and leader of the Environmental Structures Research Group (ESRG), reflects on the complementary paths taken by architectural and software patterns.

Questions for Michael:

  • Have software patterns influenced your work in architecture?
  • Can we expect patterns to last if we can't keep the books in print?
  • Do you realize wiki needed patterns to get started?

Related sites:

JimNewkirk came to Portland to attend the Agile Open Northwest conference and was kind enough to stop by for lunch with the AboutUs developers. Our conversation revolved around agile practices and the central role played by continuous integration (CI) and source code control.

Questions for Jim:

  • How does CI encourage extreme programming?
  • Are people surprised by the impact of CI?
  • What do you mean by period-of-instability?
  • What made you confidence that CI is worth the effort?
  • Is modularity a fallacy when we want integrated software ?
  • What are the challenges to agile going forward?
  • Where did the user stories for CodePlex come from?

Related sites:

Testing guru ElisabethHendrickson came to Portland to address the agile community at XPDX. While here, she was kind enough to visit us at AboutUs and shares insights she has gained working with top flight agile teams.

Questions for Elisabeth:

  • Why are you uncomfortable with capital E-T exploratory testers?
  • Is it easy or hard to learn exploratory testing?
  • Does an exploratory mindset conflict with that required for development?
  • Has agile development made exploratory testing easier?

Related sites:

The Seattle ALT.NET conference brought one time co-worker EduardoJezerski and myself together again. I learned more about his work launching agile software laboratories devoted to sustainable innovation to humanitarian ends.

Questions for Ed:

  • Why develop humanitarian technology inside the developing countries?
  • Explain how an innovation laboratory works
  • What open-source projects have your lab delivered?
  • How has this work been different than that in big companies?
  • Any advice for others interested in humanitarian of work?

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Community: Copyright:

This site and the video interviews distributed here are copyright (c) WardCunningham and licensed to you under the CreativeCommons AttributionShareAlike license.

 
Last edited March 14, 2009
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