Ceremony

We've covered bits and pieces of the closing days of TWU XVIII with Ending on a High Note and Graduates. The only piece we didn't really cover was the ceremony.

After a brief slideshow put together by the trainers Felix and Elian, we announced diplomas. The first several graduates gave a speech upon receipt. Hilariously, the speech-giving ended by request. Now that's an agile, adaptable team!

Elian was my coach and presented me with my diploma.

Out of nowhere, there were chants for dancing. I knew it'd be much less fun without the other half of the award-winning team.

Six and a half weeks later, SG Hill is a graduate of the University and has 160 hours of project experience.

The next project begins Monday in sunny Los Angeles, California.

Note In an effort for cleaner posts, picture attributions popup when holding your mouse over the pictures. The first three were taken by Sumeet.

Graduates

Today was the last day of ThoughtWorks University XVIII. The schedule was fairly light.

Futurespective

After each iteration in a project, we reflect with a retrospective. The task for this futurespective was to imagine we were six months in the future, managed to be let back into High Note, and had completed a successful project. We wanted to write down what did go well and what didn't go well.

It's a pretty cool technique for getting the fears and risks of a project directly out of the customer's mouth. It's also a useful technique for realizing the fears of new and confidences of new TWU graduates.

Our successes ranged from completing the University to learning new technologies and successfully deploying products. Our imagined failures had a much wider range. We thought of things as wild as QAs (Quality Analysts) being eaten by tigers. More mundane shortcomings were brought up as well, like spending too much time on trivial tasks.

Richard's Birthday

Friend of the blog, Richard, turned 22 today. If you'll recall the previous birthday posts, we have a few traditions here: kicking and caking. Richard was fortunate enough to avoid one of them. We'll head to the video to see which one.

Note This certainly isn't the last post of India. We at the blog have quite a few more things to say in the coming days.