Education

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
- Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990)

The part of my curriculum vitae I spend in school, at courses or conferences:

2022

Course

• Course "Beyond Bureaucracy", by Palladio Trusted Advisors, St. Paul de Vence (France): Interesting course on understanding complexity, making sense and orient ourselves in a complex world, and how to develop an organization with complexity in mind.

2018

Conferences

• QCon.ai Conference, San Francisco (CA): When to use machine learning versus rule-based solutions, Basics of deep learning, Tensorflow Jumpstart.

2017

Conferences

• Domain-Driven Design Europe Conference, Amsterdam (NL): How to segment applications using bounded contexts and event sourcing.

2016

Conferences

• O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference, New York (NY): Major takeaways: Hands-on: Implementing a microservice architecture, Pitfalls of microservice architectures.

2015

Conferences

• QCon Conference, London (UK): Major takeaways: Your code as a crime scene (interesting take on code analysis and segmentation), Lessons learned from scaling services at Google and Ebay, Microservices and evolutionary architecture, How to migrate to microservices.

2014

Conferences

• Global Scrum Gathering, New Orleans (LA): Gained insights in value stream creation and how to build distributed distributed Agile teams.

2011

Course

• "Leading Change in Complex Organizations" Program, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge (MA): Interesting one week course, incorporating MIT's research into the topic of change management in big organizational settings.

2010

Conferences

• XPDays Germany, Hamburg (Germany): Hosted two OpenSpace sessions (one on Kanban Antipatterns and one on the Agile Perfection Game).
• XP2010 Conference, Trondheim (Norway): Hosted one OpenSpace session on factors and stories of self-organization.

2009

Courses and Conferences

• Making Sense … Gaining Cognitive Edge, London (UK): Accreditation to use Cognitive Edge methods in making sense of events in a complex world, based on the ideas of David Snowden.
• Agile Product Development, Piecemeal Growth (Netherlands): In-house workshop helping our teams and myself to improve our skills in agile planing and product owner involvement. Perfectly prepared by Marc Evers and Willem van den Ende.
• IAF Europe Conference 2009, Oxford (UK): Useful workshops for improving my facilitation skills.
• 11th ScrumGathering, Munich (Germany)

2008

Courses and Conferences

• Unit Testing Masterclass, Piecemeal Growth (Netherlands): In-house workshop helping our teams and myself to improve our skills in unit testing. Perfectly prepared by Marc Evers and Willem van den Ende.
• 9th ScrumGathering, Stockholm (Sweden)
• AYE Conference 2008, Phoenix, Arizona (USA): Wonderful workshops on soft skill development and amplifying one's effectiveness, with Johanna Rothmann, Esther Derby, Don Gray, Steve Smith and the late Gerald M. Weinberg.

2007

Conferences

• QCon Conference, London (UK)
• 7th ScrumGathering, London (UK): Held talk on Pitfalls in Scrum together with Joseph Pelrine.
• XP Day 2007, London (UK): Held talk on Pitfalls in Agile Processes together with Joseph Pelrine. Was voted best talk of conference.

2006

Courses of study and workshops

• The Deep Dynamics of Agile Teams, MetaProg and Cohesive ID, London (UK): Workshop about building agile teams in the face of uncertainty, focussing also on the psychological side of things, with Ben Fuchs and Joseph Pelrine.
• Introduction to Jini 2.x, Lone Crusader Ltd, Lucerne (Switzerland): In-house workshop introducing the novelties of Jini 2.x to our team led by Dan Creswell.
• Advanced ScrumMaster Course, Minneapolis, USA: In depth course covering four core areas: collaboration skills for agile teams, retrospectives, estimating/planning and scaling Scrum (taught by Esther Derby, Mike Cohn and Ken Schwaber).
• 5th ScrumGathering, Minneapolis (USA): Workshop for advancing agile Scrum skills and helping to network with other ScrumMasters.
• Refactoring to Patterns, Lucerne (Switzerland): Two in-house workshops on how to refactor existing code to patterns with Prof. Peter Sommerlad of patterns fame.

2005

Courses of study and workshops

• The Roots of Agility, Lucerne (Switzerland): Workshop about complexity theory and agile software development with Joseph Pelrine.
• ScrumMaster Practicing Certification, Advanced Developments Methods (USA): Got accepted as a practicing ScrumMaster by Ken Schwaber after having shown to apply Scrum principles on a current project.
• Advanced ScrumMaster Course, Boston (USA): In depth course covering three core areas: Facilitation, building cross-functional teams and metrics (taught by Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn and Esther Derby).
• 3rd ScrumGathering, Boston (USA): Workshop for advancing agile Scrum skills and helping to network with other ScrumMasters.

2004

Course of study and workshop

• ScrumMaster Certification, Advanced Developments Methods, Vienna (Austria): Facilitating agile project management, using a lightweight methodology (CMM Level 3 compliant) developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.
• 1st ScrumGathering, Vienna (Austria): Workshop for advancing agile Scrum skills and to network with other ScrumMasters.

2001

Course of study

• Guerilla Java, DevelopMentor (England): Programming day and night in Java, with introductions to RMI, SOAP and XML processing.

2000

Course of study

• Professional GUI-Development with Swing and JFC, Sun Microsystems (Switzerland): Building professional Java GUIs using the Swing Library.

1998

Courses of study

• Distributed Applications in Java, Digicomp (Switzerland): Introduction to building distributed systems in Java (UDP, sockets, RMI and CORBA/IDL). database connectivity.
• Application Development with Java Foundation Classes, Java Beans and JDBC, Digicomp (Switzerland): Introduction to building Java GUIs using the Swing Library and database connectivity.
• Object Oriented Design (UML), GFT Akademie (Germany): Inhouse course introducing systems design (subsystems, persistency, architecture and application-frameworks) and class design (method design, relationships, inheritence, optimization), best practices and quality metrics for class design, design patterns.
• Object Oriented Analysis (UML), GFT Akademie (Germany): Inhouse course introducing the UML notation, diagram types, analysis process, task object model, static and dynamic object model.
• Concepts and Fundamentals of the Object Oriented Approach, GFT Akademie (Germany): Inhouse course introducting OO concepts and their impact on planning and executing software development projects.
• Programming in Visual Basic, Microwin (Switzerland): Introduction to programming in Visual Basic and how to build ActiveX components.
• Programming in Progress, Progress Software AG (Switzerland): Introduction to programming in the PROGRESS 4th GL and the corresponding database system.

1997

Courses of study

• Object Oriented Design, Gruppe für angewandte Informatik AG (Switzerland): OOD course showed how to go about system and class design based on Rumbaugh methodology. System design consisted of how to build subsystems, layering of applications, definition of class responsibilities, introduction to basic design patterns.
• Internet Application Development in Java, Global Knowledge Network (Switzerland): Introduction to Java programming and its use to develop internet applications.

1995

Course of study

• Software Ergonomics, Digicomp (Switzerland): Aspects of software ergonomics, GUI design, information presentation, HCI patterns.

1990

Course of study

• Local Area Networks, Interrep SA (Switzerland): Introduction and overview of Local Area Network technology and TCP/IP communication protocols.

1988

Courses of study

• Database Design, Systor-Institut (Switzerland): Introduction to data analysis, data modeling concepts, entity relationship models, data normalization, physical database design, data dictionaries.
• Application Engineering, Systor-Institut (Switzerland): Introduction to object system design, conceptual modeling of reality, information system design, program structure, logical data views, dynamic and static aspects of application design, CASE systems.

1987

Courses of study

• HP3000 TurboImage Database System, Hewlett-Packard (Switzerland): Administration and programming of the HP TurboImage CODASYL network database system.
• Training in Structured Analysis, Systor-Institut (Switzerland): Introduction to system engineering principles including project inception and administration, project phases, interview techniques, top down design, system analysis (Jackson, Datafow, Black-Box), dialog design, team development, software ergonomics, testing concepts, project management and economics.

1986

Courses of study

• HP3000 System Operator, Hewlett-Packard (Switzerland): System maintenance of the HP3000/70 mainframe computer system.
• HP3000 System Manager, Hewlett-Packard (Switzerland): System administration and configuration of HP3000/70 mainframe computer system.

1978 - 1985

Kantonsschule Alpenquai, Lucerne (Switzerland) (High School / College)

• Graduated with Matura Type C (Scientific and Technical Direction)
• First contact with computers (…the legendary Commodore PET 2000 with a full 4K of RAM!!!).
• First programming experience using GW-BASIC on a Victor Sirius under CP/M 80 and later on under MS-DOS 1.25. The first application was a fractal generator. At least the Sirius was able to draw graphics (black and white) at a resolution of 800 x 400 pixels (not bad then!!!).
• Progams written in Turbo Pascal 3.0 followed.
• The last half year at school we where programming on a Prime Mainframe operating under PRIMOS, a UNIX-based host system at a nearby technology institute. We were developing a program capable of visualizing 3D wireframe models of polyhedrons, including some really nifty rotating and clipping algorithms. The programming language used was UCSD Pascal.
• Programming had taken hold of me…

1972 - 1978

Primary School, Buchrain (Switzerland)

• The seriousness of life begins…