Before leaving TW, I used my employee health care spending account to get laser eye surgery. It was something that I had been considering for years, but finally had the opportunity and excuse to do. The surgery was quick and painless, and after two days I was able to see pretty much as well as I could before with my glasses. Having the ability to see naturally again without glasses has been so incredibly liberating and worthwhile.

February
After ThoughtWorks, I considered doing some local agile consulting and working on my nascent product idea; however, I came across an opportunity with a local startup company that was exactly what I wanted to do. For years, I had been looking for an opportunity to apply my skills and experience building software systems to a cause that I am passionate about: namely, to address the threat of global climate change. The company, Small Energy Group, builds software to help organizations save money and reduce energy consumption by operating their facilities more efficiently. 1/3 of all energy consumed in North America goes to heating, lighting, cooling and ventilating buildings, so helping buildings use less energy has a large impact on our overall ecological footprint.

In February, I launched Agile Vancouver tech talks. For a while I had been feeling that the content of the regular Agile Vancouver monthly meetings had become targeted at project management and were neglecting the technical practices in the agile canon, despite the fact that the majority of our members are developers. The tech talks are an attempt to re-engage this part of the community, with more of an emphasis on discussion (fishbowls or Q&A) and hands-on tutorials than on talking heads.

March
My first major launch with Small Energy Group was a site for Earth Hour. We partnered with various local organizations to help them track their energy consumption for the event to show and quantify the impact of their energy savings actions. The event proved to be great PR for the company and demonstrated our ability to respond quickly and out-maneuver larger players.

April
When I started at Small Energy Group, I was the third developer. During April and May, we doubled that number. Okay, one of the hires is a graphic designer, not a developer — but as I had been doing (poorly) some of the graphic design, his hire was a big relief.

I also zipped down to Seattle for alt.net. It was a good opportunity to catch up with former colleagues and to reacquaint myself with what was happening in the .NET space.

I also had been doing some local consulting on the side, mainly retrospectives, training and the like. After working for a larger company and being part of a broader community, working at a startup felt a bit insular. I found that the occasional consulting gig was a great way to stay in touch with what was happening in the local software community.

May
During the middle of May, I headed out to Toronto to speak at DevTeach. It was a bit of a push to get my three presentations ready in time, as I didn’t have much chance to work on them beforehand, but I managed. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to as many presentations as I would have liked. Being there, I did feel a bit like an impostor, however, not having done any active .NET development in several months. At least I was a member of the cool kid minority doing .NET on MacBooks.

While at the conference, I did a podcast with Scott Hanselman on Continuous Monitoring. The podcast was well received and I set up a community to explore the idea.

June
In June, we had our first company retreat on beautiful Hornby Island. The company founder’s family has some beautiful property on the island and we spent our days in planning and brainstorming sessions, and our spare time exploring the island. The retreat formed the basis for planning the first productized release of the SEG software. The plan was to spend one week building up different core areas of the product with the full team devoted to a specific feature.

My family also spent a few weeks over on Gibsons. I was commuting back and forth by bike (and ferry); it was hot and strenuous but a beautiful to get to work.

July
July was quite disruptive as we were required to move from our apartment as it had been sold. After a bit of a disagreement with the new owner, we found a new place a couple of blocks down. Moving post-kids is definitely much more work than moving pre-kids when our stuff fit into 2 suitcases and 2 backpacks.

When we were able to take a break from packing, cleaning and moving, we had a number of wonderful weekend bike trips to the scenic Gulf Islands.

August
In August, I delivered a 3-hour tutorial on Continuous Monitoring at Agile 2008 in Toronto. I had originally requested to do a 30 minute product demo, but through various alterations somehow ended up with a three hour tutorial – ostensibly on Continuous Integration. The conference itself was a bit of a disappointment – much of it was rehash. It was a good to reconnect with friends from the Agile community, but I get the feeling that the interesting stuff is happening elsewhere.

September
September marked the our version 1 release for the product. In reality, the product had been around for quite a bit longer; however, this release marked the release of targeted feature set together with a marketing and sales vision.

October
In October, I took a trip with my family to San Francisco. Despite being a software guy, I had never been to Silicon Valley. The trip was a great chance to explore the area and to catch up with friends living there.

November
At the start of November, we hosted the 3rd annual Agile Vancouver conference. We had spent much of the year organizing the conference, securing speakers, building the programme and dealing with logistics, so it was great to have it come to fruition. This year’s conference was the largest yet, with 3 parallel tracks, one day of tutorials and over 20 invited speakers, including Sanjiv Augustine, David Hussmann, David Anderson, Ken Schwaber, Lisa Crispin and others.

We also had our second corporate retreat at Whistler. With the growth of the company, it was a great chance to review our goals, plans and targets.

December
With the company continuing to expand, we had a family Christmas party on the top of Grouse mountain (one of our clients). Things continue to grow apace with the product and the addition of new clients and colleagues alike.

In the Open final, the Canadian men’s team took on their American rivals. Despite being the underdogs, the Canadian team came out with an early lead due to some intense, high-energy play. As the rain started coming down and the wind picked up, the Americans began to resort to calling out fouls left, right and centre. Ultimate frisbee is a game without referees, where the rules are balanced to provide a fair system of play — assuming, of course, that players are displaying good sportsmanship. Time and again the Americans called fouls on legitimate defensive plays made by the Canadians. It was a shame to see such dispirited play. Fortunately, the Canadians really showed their class and shrugged off the controversial calls to prevail in the end 17-15. I was proud to see the Canadian side rise above the pettiness and carry the victory.

Reading the public reaction, at least here Canada, to the devastation has been challenging. The quake happened right at a time when criticism of China’s human rights policies and policy towards Tibet in the lead up to the Olympics was at its peak. Underlying this criticism there is also an unstated fear of China’s growing economic dominance as North American economies head further into recession. Watching people struggle to switch from China bashing to sympathy for those affected by the earthquake is to get a sense of how complex and tangled these issues are. At least in China, unlike in Burma, people are supported by a strong military and a central government that is acting in the interests of its people. On the other hand, this self-sufficiency makes me feel powerless to do anything to help.

Her new band consists of an upright base, drums, acoustic guitar and a xylophone. I wasn’t sure how the xylophone would work, but it sounded great and it was a nice enhancement to the sound of her older material.

This year’s Earth Hour was a very busy event for me and my new company Small Energy Group. In partnership with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver City Hall, and the Village of Hartley Bay, we monitored the energy use over the day for each site to quantify and make visible the energy savings impact of their actions. UBC had committed to powering down non-essential services over the entire day; City Hall shut off the floodlights lighting the art deco facade for the building; and in Hartley Bay, they turned off the diesel generator that supplies power to the whole community plunging the village into darkness.

You can see the results of the savings achieved by each site by checking out the web site: http://earthhour.smallenergygroup.com/.

However, having recently returned from 6 months in China, I wasn’t really looking forward to the prospect of more travel. China was a great experience, but it sure made it feel nice to be back home. As there’s nothing happening for ThoughtWorks in Vancouver these days, work would mean spending a considerable amount of time on the road or moving elsewhere. Considering that I live in Vancouver because I love being in Vancouver, spending most of my waking hours away defeats the purpose. I also wasn’t looking forward to being an absentee father to my amazing one year-old daughter. So, it was time to part ways with the company.

For my last day, ThoughtWorks graciously offered to fly me out to Calgary to say farewell to some of my colleagues. Serendipitously it coincided with the office’s annual ski trip to the Rockies, so I got 3 days of fabulous skiing at Fernie in the bargain. It had been snowing heavily before we arrived, so there was tonnes of fresh powder. JJ and I had a once-in-a-lifetime run down the saddles into Lizard Bowl just as the ski patrol dropped the ropes.

In considering what to do next, I was pretty confident in finding local Agile consulting engagements in the city by leveraging my growing network here. I also had a burning product idea that I was thinking about tackling. But what I really wanted to do, and have wanted to do for the last 6 years, is to align my skills and experience delivering enterprise systems with the issue that matters most to me — namely, addressing the problem of global warming. Fortuitously, just as I started looking around, an opportunity came into my inbox via the Web of Change mailing list. The opportunity was with a local start up called Small Energy Group that is helping large buildings and institutions to monitoring their energy usage and significantly improve their energy efficiency. Several sets of interviews later and I’m the newest member of their team.

I can’t talk too much about what we’re working on right now. But we have a public release coming up quite soon, so I’ll post information about it then.

The company is located in (unassuming) Dundarave, West Van. I’m commuting back at forth to work by bicycle (one of these days I’ll post pictures). This is what my route looks like:

When planning the session we really didn’t know how many people would turn up. The previous attempt to do something similar ended up with very few attendees. So I was surprised to arrive at 5.45 and find that about 30 people were already there and more were trickling in. We probably ended up with about 50 people all told. I quickly realized that my idea of having an open discussion would not work — so we turned it into a fish bowl instead. I think that the fish bowl worked quite well and we had a pretty good variety of people opting to come up and speak.

The topic was “Branching and Merging on Agile projects”. Remarkably we managed to stay pretty much on topic throughout. I was especially happy to see some people come forward and posit unconventional positions like:

• source control is not necessary on Agile projects because it is an impediment to communication
• using file locking to control access to different parts of the repository
• distributed vs centralised source control systems

Now that more people are familiar with the fishbowl format, I hope that even more people will participate next time. A few things that we will change for next time:

• Greg Young suggested distributing cards at the start of the session to collect suggestions for the next session’s topic. We can post these on the wall and people can vote on them on the way out.
• Shorten the length of the fish bowl so that there is more opportunity for small group interaction after the session. I think restricting the fishbowl to 1 hour is sufficient.
• Greg also suggested collecting feedback on the session that can be collected at the point when people vote on the session.

I’d like to try some small group sessions or micro-open space sessions, but for now I think that it will be good to try to keep the format consistent as more people get the chance to become familiar with it. If you have other feedback or ideas for the event please let me know!

GiveMeaning.com is the brainchild of Vancouver-based philanthropist Tom Williams, who I met a couple of years ago at Web Of Change. He gave a few demos of the site at the conference, but Josie’s charity is the first time that I’ve had the chance to use it. It’s nice to see people using ASP.NET for a good cause :)