Thursday 3 March 2011

Charity Work

As most of you will know myself and five friends are raising funds for Maggie's Centres as well as training for their Bike'n'Hike event.

From the Maggies webite
What is a Maggie's Centre?
A Maggie’s Centre is a place to turn to for help with any of the problems, small or large, associated with cancer.


One in three people are affected by cancer, that is a terrifying ratio. Having visited the Glasgow Centre it is clear how incredibly important this charity is to people at a harrowing time in their life.

So what do I intend to do to help raise funds I hear you ask?
I am offering my services as an Agile Coach and Developer to anyone who is willing to donate £500 or more per day to Maggies Cancer Centres.

What do you get for your donation over and above a warm fuzzy feeling for helping out a much in need charity?
Presumably the overarching goal for your company is that I can help your team make more ( or save more ) money faster.

How can I help achieve that with your software development team?
* Introduce Agile Techniques and the values of Communication, Feedback, Simplicity and Courage.
* Aid improvement of the teams current process
* Pair up with developers to improve technical skills like Acceptance Testing, TDD, and Refactoring.

I have added a section about my experience to date below. If it sounds like I could be of benefit to your company or development team why not get in touch and make me an offer?

In summary, I am offering my services for a period of up to 5 days to help your team or develop software. Ideally this would be in early April, and for each day onsite you would donate at least £500 to Maggies Centres via http://justgiving.com/jiggypete

The types of technology that I am most familiar with are Ruby, Rails and Java.
If you have any questions please do get in touch, this is all for a very good cause.

You can contact me via any of these methods,
Email: jiggypete at gmail .com
Twitter: @jiggy_pete
Website: jiggypete.com

My Experience:
For 10 years I have been working in XP teams and have been heavily involved with the Scottish Agile community.
The types of applications I have worked on are,
* Tools to create Blu-ray discs,
* Multi-million pound trading applications,
* Pension apps,
* Tools to allow bus drivers to submit timesheets
* and applications that run a repair line,

Thankyou for your time,
Peter Aitken

7 comments:

Stuart Blair said...

I was Pete's manager at JPMorgan when we worked on the banks web-trading and grid-based CDO pricing plafforms. He's a talented guy and while 1 week of his time might not seem like a lot, it really is. I can tell you from experience that by Tuesday afternoon he'll have identified the manual processes in your teams development that slow progress and introduce the chance of manual error. By Wednesday lunchtime, he'll have figured out how to automate these processes and have implemented the automation. By Thursday morning, the changes will have been socialized throughout the team by pairing with the team members so that it's team code, not his. By the next Monday when he's gone, you'll be trying to figure out how you can afford him on a non-charity basis.

Please bear in mind that I last worked with Pete in 2007. By now, I fully expect his talents allow him to cure cancer by the laying on of hands and to solve software maladies by simply staring intently at the codebase with an expression of stern concentration. Bluntly put, Pete's your man. This is the sale of the century. What are you waiting for?

Rob Lally said...

As someone else who was once fortunate enough to have Pete work for me, I can completely support everything Stuart Blair says.

Peter Aitken is smart, focussed, hard-working, talented and generally an asset to any team he works on. His positive attitude alone can boost the morale and productivity of a team.

Couple those attributes, with the fact that he is an outstanding human being ( something you can surmise for yourself from his generous offer ) and you have an opportunity to help both yourself and a worth cause at the same time.

clarke said...

I've not worked with Pete, but Stuart and Rob have and I respect their opinions enormously.

I have spent a lot of time talking with Pete about Agile and he really knows his stuff. More than that though: he's got a nice, friendly way about him that helps people work together.

Clarke Ching
Chair, AgileScotland.

Chris McDermott said...

I recently managed to persuade my organisation to hire Pete as an Agile coach & Ruby developer. Having worked with him on 2 separate occasions in the past I knew the qualities he would bring to our team. He joined just over 3 weeks ago and as I expected made a telling contribution from day 1. His boundless enthusiasm, desire to get the job done right and great technical ability make him a fantastic addition to any software development team.

I highly recommend you take this opportunity to hire Pete... you can only have him for one week though, then we’ll need him back!

T.J. Sheehy said...

I worked with Peter for over a year and from the first few days he had a huge impact on how I develop software.

He is great technically, but you should really hire him because he can quickly improve your team's approach, output and morale with hands-on agile mentoring.

Peter gets on really well with developers and users and is always making sure everyone is focused and delivering what's most important.

He's a rare breed of developer and this is a great offer.

Brian Swan said...

I've worked with Pete on a couple of different projects and always found him to be a highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic developer. He has a knack for automating mundane manual processes which will help speed up development. Even a week of his time will really make a difference.

Wesley Gorman said...

Peter worked with us here for the best part of two years, across a number of projects for a number of clients. His feature development and programming expertise have been consistently of a high standard.

The important word I'd emphasise there is consistent, Peter takes a very systematic approach to every story/feature and produces the quality work of the same standard time and again. If there's an issue with anything, either on the business or technical side, he's well capable of dealing with the situation before things get out of control and then moving on with the feature. Peter keeps himself up to date with developments within the community, does good research when new/difference requirements appear and has introduced a number of new tools and practices to our team.

I would definitely work with Peter again in the future.