Promo Video Contest

Tim and I aren't videographers (although I do like his video, see the previous post in this blog). Nor are we in real, day-to-day teams right now (I'm doing on-customer-site consulting, tough to get permissions and such). So we're looking for someone to provide us with a cool video that shows your team's use of Agile in a Flash, and helps promote the book.

We're offering as a prize a ten-pack of cards ($110 at PragProg) for the video we choose as the best. In return, you'd grant us rights and permissions to use the video and whoevers' likenesses for promotional use.

Please email me (jeff at langrsoft.com) if you have any further questions about the contest.

Contest deadline: February 28, 2011

Legal stuff: This is all arbitrary, and Tim and I reserve all rights, including the right to not choose a video if none suits our promotional needs.

The Deal



Agile In A Flash is not a replacement for coaching, training, consulting, and those wonderful books that my colleagues have written.  Agile in a Flash is a great way to get started, and a great tool for coaches, trainers, and consultants to use in teaching Agile software development to their clients and colleagues.

This is our first released video about the cards. Stay tuned.

Released.

It's here! After a few years of writing, a lot of editing, a bit of promotion, and a whole lot of work, Pragmatic Programmers has released Agile In A Flash.

To our knowledge there is not another product like this one anywhere in the world, on any topic. We've worked hard to make something useful and unique for our Agile community. We have spent a lot of time on format and form factor, phrasing, clarifying points when possible, and weeding out the cards that seemed less useful. As a result of our extreme culling and revisits, you will find powerful advice in a surprisingly small package.

Pragmatic Programmers helped us to make it affordable for teams and companies alike, and individual copies are not out of "impulse purchase" range.  This was a departure from their normal publishing activities, but they believed in it and did a lot of legwork to make it possible.  They've been supportive and amazing, and I hope you will reward them with your custom.

Thank you for your comments, reviews, tweets and retweets.  Today the project is entirely "real" and we appreciate all our readers have done (and may continue to do) to make this crazy little idea work.

New PragProg article: Code Coupling

Our latest in our series of "big ideas in software" is now available and appearing in the PragPub January 2011 issue. This is the second article out of four, each covering one of cohesion, coupling, abstraction, and volatility. In this article on coupling, we talk about the impacts of too many dependencies in your software, and what you can do to prevent it.

In addition to the HTML version, you also find PDF, epub, and mobi versions of the article here.

Agile in a Flash is slated for publication on January 20! You can advance-order now from Amazon; you'll also soon be able to order in bulk, at a discount, from PragProg directly (and this is the kind of thing for which you'll want a separate copy for everyone on your team).

Meanwhile, Tim and I are banging out the next article, on abstraction, in the series. If you have any advance thoughts on what you'd like to see covered, drop a comment here or send us a line.

Thanks for reading!