• For the first time in my career I’m trying to organize a public workshop completely on my own. The topic is Advanced TDD and I’m very thrilled about the simulations and exercices I want to do there. The first run will be in German.
• I’m auctioning one of the seats for this workshop on ebay. Let’s see how this turns out.
• Since I’m very eager to reach the minimum participation of 4 as soon as possible, I’ll give a commission of 20 percent to anyone who’ll send me a customer until 4 seats are taken. Just tell the interested person to refer to you when they contact me.

Update
The first auction ended at 401 EUR. So I started a second one which resulted in 512 EUR. Not bad I’d say..

Update 2
I’m sold out 6 weeks in advance.

The exercises you are supposed to work on in my workshops are not very complicated but they stress one or two essential points. If you just rush over them, you can solve the task, but most of the effect lies in thinking about and discussing the subtleties of different solutions and approaches. That’s why I make participants work in pairs, especially in Pair-Programming workshop! Watching people work reveals that nowadays many – if not most – don’t do this carefull pondering and discussing anymore. They just hurry to a solution, going back to their email-reader or smart phone as soon as a solution to the task at hand seems to be found. When doing it this way most of the benefits of Pair-Programming, Test-Code-Refactor & Specifiaction by Example are lost. It’s all about thinking, discussing, experimenting, rethinking, rediscussing and improving.

During my first years of giving talks and presenting tutorials I always stopped on ringing cell phones, and I made sure the workshop computers had no internet access. I asked people to either switch their phones off or to leave. In short: I required attendants to be attentive! I guess I’ll have to reestablish these rules in workshops to come. Not in order to patronize people, just to become effective again.