Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man

As you might already know, Microsoft has agreed to host the next Simple Design and Testing Conference on Sep 12 - 14th 2008. Big thanks to Jim Newkirk, who has been the driving force on Microsoft’s side and is helping us organize this conference.

The venue for the conference is:

Microsoft Midwest
3025 Highland Pkwy., Suite 300
Downers Grove, IL 60515
Phone: (630) 725-4000
Fax: (630) 495-7764

For this year’s conference we are using the “Position Paper” approach, like last year. If you want to participate in this conference, please update your position paper on our wiki right now.

Also note that we need your help to make this event possible. Please have a look at the list of items that we need organizations/individuals to sponsor.

I’ll be presenting two tutorials at the XP 2008 conference : http://www.lero.ie/xp2008/tutorials.html

• Acceptance Test Driven Development
• Refactoring Fest

Agile Mumbai 2008 conference will be hosted by Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management & Engineering, Mumbai on the 28th and 29th March 200. For this conference we have decided to have only tutorials and workshops. There is a growing feeling that plain talks at conferences are not very effective. So we want to increase the participants experience at the conference by hand picking really good speakers who have excellent material to deliver.

Based on what has happened so far, I’m convinced that this will be a very successful conference. We have 5 international speakers and 7 national speakers. We have over 2 weeks to go and already we have 183 people who have registered on the website. Even though we can accommodate more people, we have decided to cap the conference at 150 participants. So if you want to make sure you get a seat at the conference, please block your seat by send in your registration fee in advance. More details : http://agileindia.org/registration?event_id=17

Sanjiv has been kind enough to run 3 free workshops in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai, India for ASCI. In this workshop Sanjiv will discuss about The Evolution of Agile for Complex, Multi-Project Environment.

More details: http://agileindia.org/smallisbeautifulbysanjivaugustine

I’ll be presenting on Agile Testing at a Testing Workshop organized by CSI and IEEE Computer Society, Madras Chapter in Chennai. The Theme for the workshop is “All Round Testing: State of ART in Software Testing”.

More details about the workshop : http://www.csi-chennai.org/swtesting.pdf

Here is the final program: Agile Testing Workshop Program

Jim Newkirk emailed me earlier today to inform me that Microsoft will host the next Simple Design and Testing Conference on September 19th, 20th and 21st. It would be at the conference center in Downers Grove. Exact address:

Microsoft Midwest
3025 Highland Pkwy., Suite 300
Downers Grove, IL 60515

Its good to see Microsoft support the SDTConf. All credit should go to Jim for getting this approved.

Will soon update the website with details.