SPUG:Damian is still available for corporate visits

[Michael R. Wolf]

But one day only -- Friday (tomorrow).

If last night's talk inspired you, or gave you some insights, perhaps
you could share them with the rest of your group.  I've appended
Damian's response to "What is a corporate visit?".

If you can act quiickly, you can snarf up a great value for your
company.  Contact Tim Maher of Consultix on 206/781-UNIX for further
details.


What's a Corporate Visit?

Pretty much whatever the paying customer wants. I can
give inspirational and/or mind-altering talks to the troops
(e.g. extended versions of SelfGOL or Quantum::Superpositions),

I can teach practical half-day or day-long courses, I can do Q&A or
brainstorming sessions, discuss programming techniques, lecture on
presentation/communication techniques, advise on software engineering
problems and solutions, take people very deeply into Perl 6, and
into the principles of good design we're attempting to apply to its
development, run master-classes in coding and algorithmic design,
talk them through my own mental processes as I design and code
ad-lib programs, bring a unique perspective to code reviews or
design sessions, and tell scandalous stories about the leaders of
the Perl community.

I can be a reviewer, a reference, or a resource.

But I suspect that I'm *best* used as a de-furrower of the en-rutted
mind.  That is, to shake a programming team up mentally, throw them
off balance, wake them to different ways of looking at the world,
of thinking about programming, challenge their assumptions and
expectations, help them regain that sense of wonder and discovery
than first drew them into IT. It might be by pushing their limits
in my Advanced Module Development class, or by showing them the
remarkable elegance with which we're fitting the pieces of Perl 6
together, or just in the simple act of inventing on the spur of the
moment a cleaner way to code a particular loop. Whatever it takes
to bounce them out of their everyday grind, and get them excited
about their work again.

It sounds a bit nebulous, I know, but it really works. Companies
like Morgan Stanley and Amazon.com have me do a day or two of that
kind of training every time I visit them, and generally rate it
higher than anything else I do for them.

-Damian Conway