The key is empowering the people who do the work
I was humbled and encouraged to learn that I was nominated for Nordic Startup Awards category of Developer Hero for my contributions to the developer community. You can vote for me or one of the other great candidates here.
For the last ten years, I have felt that the main pain points of the software development world could be fixed by empowering and inspiring those who do the work. From my perspective, I have focused on the developers.
If you are a developer working on a project, both you and the people around you will benefit greatly if you learn new things and share what you know about the problem your project is trying to solve, about the technologies you use and about the way you’re working.
Ideas like pair programming to spread the knowledge, simple design to make it possible to understand the whole solution and collaborative product backlog planning to understand the problem can help you do this.
This was the inspiration behind me starting up Oslo Extreme Programming meetup in 2004. We have hosted about 100 meetups over the years.
But even beyond your project, if you can share and learn from others in you community, we will grow even further. I have long been a fan of the lightning talk format. Most of the smart experience is in the heads of those who don’t often give talks, who don’t have a lot of time to prepare a long talk and who perhaps only feel they have one or two things to share.
If you are a human being, you know something that can inspire someone else. All you need is to have the courage to try, the patience to structure your ideas and the discipline to practice your talk.
I am proud to have witnessed some of the first talks given by some of the speakers who inspire me today, such as Christin Gorman, Karianne Berg, Henning Spjelkavik and Filip Van Laernen.
This was the inspiration behind me and others starting the Smidig (Agile in Norwegian) conference in 2007. Since 2011, I have handed over the organizing baton to others and I am happy to see that the conference is still thriving and that our original vision is still a helpful idea behind the conference. Over the years, over 500 talks have been given at the Smidig conference, many by first time speakers.
As I saw the Smidig conference in competent hands, I looked around for other areas to contribute. Fellow Developer Hero nominee Simen Sommerfelt convinced me to join the board on the Norwegian Computing Association. The organization has a 60 year history and the people who are involved with the organization possess a well of knowledge. However, the competition from meetup and other communities threaten to siphon away the vitality of the organization.
If you care about a professional field, you can step up and help others in that field find their voice. If you know the people who are worth listening to inside a field, pulling together an event where they can share their knowledge is surprisingly simple. You can use meetup.com to organize a group or you can get help from an organization like the Norwegian Computing Association.
I have been helping events happen in Norwegian Computing Association and I hope to be doing this even more in the future. Together with a great team of organizers, I helped organize the Software conference the last few years. This year, we received recognition as the Event of the year in the Norwegian Computing Association, an achievement I’m very proud of.
As I have moved from event organizer to inspiring other event organizers, my own Oslo XP meetup has fallen off the list of things I’m able to attend to. If you are looking for a place where you can contribute to the community, I would love for someone to step up as organizer for a while.
I have been privileged to be able to watch what happens when developers care about their project, share their knowledge and take responsibility for their professional community. When I see the experience and the result of people caring, I also realize that this goes beyond just the sphere of software professional.
The Norwegian government is spending billions of kroner each year on software projects. Recently, there has been a lot of attention on many of these projects that have very little to show for their investment. I believe that this waste comes from projects being run without respecting the knowledge that the developer community possesses and the professional talent that is available.
Recently, Geir Amsjø has been able to gather together a loose group of like minded people who have been contributing in the public debate on public sector IT spending. We hope that this work can affect the very way money is being allocated to these huge and important projects.
By caring about your profession in your project, your community and the world at large, you can make a difference. Enormous resources are being consumed to build IT systems around the world. Only when the people building the system care about their craft and are being listened to can this investment truly pay off.