In the first part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Woody Zuill, Expert Coach and co-author of Mob Programming, shares his career journey
- Shares how he joined software development after he created tools to improve his day-to-day life
- Jokingly Woody mentions how he didn’t have to clean up(unlike doing carpentry) after a hard day at writing code
- Early experimentation on pair programming and having fun and how he found that explaining ideas, listening each other and accepting each others opinions – most importantly stop interrupting others
- Talks about the story of using pair programming for knowledge transfer in a rapid manner
- Shares his principle on how experimenting is the fastest way to build cultural nuances
- Paying attention to others emotions and deeply listening enables – Listen as if the next sentence is the most important thing we are going to listen
- His motto – Be the best team member that you can be
- Woody shares tips and tricks on deep listening skill and staying curious
- Aha moments Woody has had how “Teams” have evolved
- How can you lead from without any of the influence and how that led him to become a speaker and teacher
Woody has been programming computers for almost 40 years, and have 20+ years of experience as an Extreme Programmer, and 15+ years as an Agile Guide of some sort. He truly believes that code must be simple, clean, and maintainable so that we can realize the Agile promise of Responding to Change, and that we must constantly “Inspect and Adapt”.
Woody is a co-author with Kevin Meadows of the book “Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach”. He’s a prolific speaker on this topic at conferences, user groups, and meet-ups all over the world.
More generally, I’ve delivered workshops, trainings, and coaching sessions on Agile Software Development, Mob Programming, and Software Development Practices for a number of firms including Ericsson, Schneider Electric, Qualcomm, Intel, H & M, King Games, Capital One, Twitter, and Spotify.
Woody can be connected at https://www.linkedin.com/in/woodyzuill/
