Awesome time presenting to the Beantown .NET Developers last night (thanks, Ben Day!).

My secret plan is to travel far and wide, getting developers excited about working for startups.You know, like an evangelist or something…

Update 1/1/13 – This is the version I presented at Agile 2011:

What Lean Startup topics would YOU like to learn more about?

I had the pleasure of attending the Continuous Deployment Breakfast with Eric Ries last week. Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology, Co-Founded IMVU who’s known for deploying code to production as many as 50 times per day!

In Agile, there’s this notion that there’s someone “out there” (e.g., the Product Owner) who has all the answers about what the product should do. However, Lean Startup says no one has all the answers. This, of course, makes sense in a startup where where the customer is To Be Determined. But I wonder if it doesn’t hold a bit of truth even for more established products… does one person really hold all the answers?

And so – if we’re not sure what the right thing to build is, our most important task becomes learning.

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Last week, Moss Colum and Laura Dean gave the Boston Software Craftsmanship group a sneak peak of their Agile 2010 Pairing Games as Intentional Practice session. And, as a bonus, we got to try the games out during our code kata.

I know what you’re thinking, Abby, you’re a freakin’ geek. And I’m okay with that. But it was WAY fun so I wanted to share.

I love the premise behind this. A lot of us struggle when pairing with another person, so let’s create games we can play (intentional practice) to help us get better at the parts we’re struggling with.

I think we can learn not only how to pair better, but also how to incorporate games into our work as a way to continuously improve ourselves and how we collaborate with others.

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This is my 4th post on Designing WordPress Blogs From Scratch.

In the last post, we covered everything surrounding our content (header, footer, sidebar) and got an intro to using WordPress functions in PHP.

Index.php

Now, technically, the only other file you need is index.php. This is where you define how each blog entry is displayed. Again, using the index.php in WordPress’s default theme to guide us, this file contains:

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