Ho Chi Minh City

Scrum Introduction Session with Daniel Shupp

Today I’ve joined a Scrum introduction session held by Daniel Shupp, CTO of TechPropulsionLabs, at Highlands Coffee on Nugyen Du in Ho Chi Minh City. In a friendly an open atmosphere Daniel walked us through the basic elements of Scrum and its application in agile software development projects. Besides pure knowledge enriched by helpful real-world examples from Daniel’s extensive software development experience, it also offered plenty of opportunities to ask questions, to right wrong assumptions about what Scrum is and how it works and to get a feeling how an adoption of Scrum in own development processes would be like. Daniel described it as part of what his company wants to give back to the local development community, with more similar events hopefully to come.

TechPropulsionLabs (www.techpropulsionlabs.com) develops software for seed and early-stage startups around the world and is a keen advocate of agile software development and Scrum.

Hopefully this helps to spread the word and raise awareness for the advantages Scrum has to offer. If you’re interested to follow this development in Vietnam, TechPropulsionLabs certainly is a company to keep in mind. Incidentally, my friend Nhan, working as a Scrum Master at Swiss IT Bridge, recently posted his opinion on Scrum in Vietnam on his blog. For a short introduction about Scrum just start with Wikipedia article and go from there.

Thank you again, Daniel, for the insightful and enjoyable session.

Java Communities in Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam

Coming from one of the leading IT countries in the world, I was used to being surrounded by lots of resources about whatever I needed in order learn and to grow and develop in my profession, software engineering with focus on custom software development in Java. There are tens of thousands of books in my own language, more software development companies that I could ever apply for, conferences specialising in everything that was, is, or will soon be mainstream, and well, more communities that I could ever participate in and contribute to. Coming to Vietnam I found myself  in an environment that doesn’t offer most of what I just mentioned. On one hand that’s because there’s probably not as much going on as in my country yet and I’m thrilled to see what this dynamic country will have to offer tomorrow and the day after. On the other hand I guess there’s a lot hidden from me and waiting to be discovered.

So I started to look around and try to discover what’s going on out there. I wanted to stick to Java developers and Java communities first. It is what seemed to make the most sense to me although I had a feeling already that I shouldn’t be too picky. Here’s a brief summary of what I found so far:

  • First checks for Java User Groups (JUG) and Java meetups on meetup.com without success.
  • One website that’s really worth mentioning is javavietnam.org. Basically a forum for Java developers, it has an incredible number of registered users and quite some activity. Unfortunately for me, it’s mostly in Vietnamese. Incredible job though! I talked to one of the founders and heard that there also used to be real meetups in town and there are plans to revive them. Would love to see that and participate.
  • There’s also some activity in groups on LinkedIn, e.g. in Vietnam IT Community, in Vietnam Digital or in the IT subgroup of Linkin Vietnam. Not at all focused on Java or even software development but developers are hanging out there and if you’re looking to connect with some of them, you might be right.
  • Twitter is always a good source of information and so I’m also trying to expand my Twitter network of English-speaking and Vietnamese-speaking software developers. Java is also limited here, but I’m making progress. I started a list of the developers Vietnam I found on Twitter and hope it will grow over time. You’re invited to follow.
  • There has been a spin-off of the famous German JAX (originally for “Java, Apache, XML”, but by now covering the entire spectrum of enterprise software development) conferences, the “JAX Asia 2008″ in Singapore. Not exactly Vietnam, but close enough to make a trip for a conference that’s really worth it. Unfortunately it remained to be a one-time experiment that apparently just failed. I hope someone will try it again soon.
  • One more question I am asking myself is how popular Java really is in Vietnam. I am still trying to get reliable statistics and/or just a big number of personal opinions on that. Feel free to comment…

For the moment that’s about it, my current state of research. I found a lot more activity once I widened my search parameters (so to speak), e.g.  for “software development” (then including .NET development and others), “software” in general (including especially the whole field of ERP and CRM) or just plain “IT” (including Web 2.0, social media, digital marketing and such). More about that in one of the next posts. For now I just stick to what the title of this post promised, Java.