Last year I attended the Agile Development Course taught in Valencia by Ricardo Borillo, Xavi Gost, Emma López and Miguel Ángel Fernández from (at least in that moment) beCode.
From April 5th to June 1st I travel from Barcelona to Valencia by train every week (the classes were from 16:00 to 20:00 on Fridays and 09:30h a 13:30h on Saturdays) to go to class. It was a lot of effort but I considered that it was totally worth it.
The course syllabus was composed of four parts each of them taught by a different person:
- Methodologies with Emma.
- QA with Miguel Ángel.
- Tools with Ricardo.
- Code with Xavi.
Bit by bit we entered the world of the Agile Manifesto, XP, TDD, refactoring, design and implementation patterns, git, SOLID, BDD, retrospectives, user stories and many other interesting things. The classes were great both because of the contents and the experience of the teachers. They always enriched every matter with their own experiences as agile and extreme developers.
My course mates were a group of very nice people mainly from Valencia and Castellón. I think that only Nico and I were coming from other provinces. Some of them have become good friends with whom I still keep in touch: Nico Cortés, Paulo Clavijo, Fermín Saez and Gabriel Moral.
During those two months I learned, read, discussed and practiced a lot and I got to know many things that I'm still working hard to learn. But, even more important than all that, was finding that there were better ways of making software at the reach of my hand.
This course was a game-changer for me. If there's a new edition this year I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about software development with an Agile flavor.
To finish I'd like to thank both the teachers and all my course mates for having made this course so great.
----------
PS: Another indirect outcome of this course was the Aprendices community created by some of the students. At the end of the course, we decided to create the community so that people from outside the course could participate in our reading club and also see all the interesting links we have had shared during the course. The community was named after the caption that Fermín Saez uses in his LinkedIn profile. This is how Aprendices came to life last June.
