The ThoughtWorks University programme is over and I'm back in my home office Pune. It was an experience of a lifetime :) On the last day when the week-long project simulation was over we were doing a retrospective of the week that was and a group brainstorm came-up with these top 3 learnings from the activity.

1. Customer Commitment.
2. Communication and Collaboration.
3. Managing customer expectations.

The project simulation is supposed to be the most significant part of the University programme. Here we are expected to apply all the consulting skills, developer/analyst specific learnings, and agile practices that we learn through the programme. Trainers double-up as customers and are constantly watching us at work. It is set-up to give us a feel of how projects are done in ThoughtWorks.

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Chautauqua, let me speak about it first. Webster's defines it as:  any of various traveling shows and local assemblies that flourished in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that provided popular education combined with entertainment in the form of lectures, concerts, and plays, and that were modeled after activities at the Chautauqua Institution of western New York. But if you read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, you know why this applies to ThoughtWorks University sessions. Its not about what a Chautauqua was intended to be (as described above), but what it actually did that matters. It was influential. (The dictionary needs to be updated.) But, how did Robert Pirsig come into the picture from out-of-the-blue?

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Imagine an organization that stores all its business data in spreadsheets. Think about integration, communication, collaboration, scaling-up, flexibility and centralized reporting. Each of these will be impossible till the time you stick to spreadsheets (ever heard of spreadsheet syndrome?). But still organizations can't help but work with spreadsheets as it cannot train each individual to understand databases or SQL querying, or is too small to afford an enterprise-level application.

Here's an online database system I happened to see called: Dabble DB, its simplicity power-packed with all those features I mentioned before.

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This post is only of historic value, now that i've moved over most of my site to posterous.
Yet i've kept it here to remind me of how it all began. 

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This post marks the birth of my blog, called "What I think.", on vinayvinay.com.

I was waiting for a big idea to hit me as to what the first post should be about (was thinking of something that could be a perfect fit). But nowadays because I am mostly reading about Agile Methodology and Extreme Programming, which emphasize on making an earlier start rather than 'the perfect start'; I thought of putting that into practice immediately.

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