The event assumes that you have some basic knowledge of Scrum. It will focus specifically on

• the Scrum Master role
• how and why it’s different from traditional project management,
• some case studiesof good and bad Scrum Master Responses
• Q&A

Anyone running Agile teams, working in a startup, or thinking about either of those is encouraged to join.

The event will be held upstairs at 1pm at the Highlands Coffee on Nguyen Du Street, Q1. No registration is necessary, but seats are limited.

Slides for the session are available here

“The Saigon Mobile Dev Camp is an event focusing on mobile application development with professionals and young software developers.

Over the weekend, participants will share, learn and innovate thanks to: Workshops animated by Vietnamese and foreign experts.

A 24-hour coding contest on mobile applications development.

Attendance is free of charge. The event will be bilingual, in both Vietnamese and English.”

Last year’s MDC was a great success. It was the first event of its kind in Vietnam, combining training in different mobile platforms with a coding competition that lets developers put their new knowledge into practice. Plus, its free and open to anyone with a passion for mobile apps and some coding skills. We had over 75 attendees, and 8 teams stayed overnight to build apps for the coding competition.

TPL organizes this event every year as part of our overall mission to bring the state of the art in Internet technology innovation to Vietnam, and fast track the development of Vietnam’s top local talent. We’re looking forward to this year’s event, and are excited to see the apps developed by this year’s participants!

The app displays realtime traffic status overlayed on google maps for roads on and near the A86 motorway near Paris. We wound up doing some nifty image processin, mapping, and geolocation mixed together on the same screen, backed by a set of web services. Try it out – especially if you speak French and live in the western Paris metro area :)

Saigon Mobile DevCamp

After a few months of prep work , the team for Saigon Mobile DevCamp has gone public with the event! The DevCamp will be a barcamp style event, with a lot of pros and amateurs from the Vietnamese Development community contributing workshops and leading a group of 100 devs through a weekend long coding competition, with prizes.

Paul, as usual, is discussing the rarefied world of founder/coders; while I love these guys, it’s not actually that great a description of the customers we work with, who tend to be exceptionally savvy in areas that aren’t software. Still, the idea is the same: spend the absolute minimum to build a real, working product and get as quickly as possible to ’sustainable’.

Of course, the whole article (including recipes) is worth reading but here’s the section that resonated the most with me:

A startup that reaches ramen profitability may now be more likely to succeed than not. Which is pretty exciting, considering the bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or make a lot of money.

While I would love it to be true that 50% of ramen profitable companies will “succeed,” I do agree that if your company can achieve any kind of real cashflow profitability, you’ve passed a huge hurdle and your chances of success are hugely better than average…not only because the business is proven to be working, but because you’re now giving yourself several different types of success to choose from.

And isn’t freedom to choose one of the real reasons we’re in this entrepreneurial game, to begin with?