Pols Consulting

I once had the pleasure of working on a team with Chris Stevenson. We had a ball. One thing I noticed was that he talked in keystrokes when you paired with him. He wouldn’t dream of saying, “let’s run all the tests and check in”, he would say “shift F10, Ctrl K”!

I must point out that Chris is not as geeky and dysfunctional as this may sound (in fact, he’s not dysfunctional at all :)). This was simply a great way to help you learn the keyboard shortcut keys and stop faffing with the mouse!

I have just found a fantastic Chris substitute. It’s an Intellij plugin called KeyPromoter that displays a big hint every time you use the mouse. It even prompts you to enter a shortcut key for things you do that don’t already have one.

So, if you’re a loser who doesn’t have anyone to code with …

The XPDay conference in London is open for business. Once again it looks like it’s going to be a cracking conference, with interesting sessions and fabulous social events (where you learn the most!).

Romilly Cocking and I are running an introductory session on XP. The best way to learn something is to experience it. We haven’t fully worked out the logistics, but we want to make it as dynamic and interactive as possible. While we are somewhat constrained by only having a 1 hour slot, we are hoping to run the session as an XP project so that people new to XP can see how it works.
Hope you can make the conference. Thanks to John Nolan for the cheaky title of this post.