Definition of a Great Agile Company

Last night I attended the inaugural meetup of the Great Agile Companies of NYC group at AppNexus‘ beautiful headquarters in New York. The event was moderated by Josh Grob, a member of AppNexus’ Agile Strategy & Execution team, with the intent of open-sourcing the definition for what it means to be a great Agile company. AppNexus’s own Agile team is less than a year old and has quickly grown to 11 full-time scrum masters. With over 500 developers building the company’s flagship online ad auctioning platform, the need for a dynamic and scalable software development process has never been stronger.

Hands-On: Building iOS and Android Apps with C#

Last night I attended a great .NET Mobile Developer meet up at Microsoft’s NYC offices entitled “Hands-On: Building iOS and Android Apps with C#“. It was hosted by Greg Shackles, author of “Mobile Development using C#“. Greg also presented at Xamarin’s Evolve conference in Austin, TX this past April. At this meetup he conducted a hands-on demo on how to build a simple iOS and Android app using Xamarin Studio and C#.

WWDC 2013 Keynote

The stakes were high for Apple to reinvent itself at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, with the tech world holding its breath to see its response after its recent stock and popularity slump. At yesterday’s Keynote address, Apple made several much-needed major new announcements. Ironically, many of the changes in OSX Mavericks and iOS 7 are copied directly from Microsoft, Google, and Palm (!), but that’s nothing new. Remember that Apple is not about being the first, but being the best. Take the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: MP3 players, cell phones, and tablet computers existed long before Apple refined them. Apple removes, refines, simplifies, and then raises the bar. In comparison to Android’s fast, splintered development, Apple can be perceived as slow. This may be why it has fallen out of favor with the tech media in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.