It's been a wonderful Xmas break, but now I'm back and the first thing I bump into is my talk from the Groovy & Grails eXchange last December.

The conference was a blast, even though I was fighting to stay healthy at the time.

Thanks to all those that attended and if anyone has any questions then please don't hesitate to leave a comment here or give me a ping on email.

This morning I was wandering to the training venue here in Istanbul when I was suddenly reminded of a spooky event that happened with my baby girl, Mali, just a couple of weeks ago.

Wandering up to my home office I noticed that Mali was peering under my work desk, calling in her squeaky baby-voice "hellllooooo?". She was clearly looking for me (although why under my desk I have no idea as I'm short but not quite that tiny).

I crept up to try and give her a little fright (I know, bad dad) and tapped her on the shoulder. However to my surprise all I got was her looking over her shoulder, grinning, and then going straight back to calling 'hello' again under the desk.

It was at that point that I started to get a little nervous and wonder what the heck she was actually saying hello too. I'd recently watching Coraline and am a big fan of Neil Gaiman's books, and my mind was rapidly streaking towards superstitious musings.

I needn't have worried though, there was nothing under the desk and my daughter got bored about 10 minutes later. Moral of the story, kids love to freak you out almost as much as you like to freak them out; just don't think they aren't able and willing!

If you've a taste for real-world agile, or just fed up of people talking about stuff they clearly aren't actually doing, then you're very welcome to come and join the Agile London community at the following pre-Xmas meetup and January mainline event. Details are:

December 7th Pre-Xmas Beers and Chin-wag Meetup of Agile London Community to Brainstorm the January Event

Time: December 7, 2010 from 6pm to 9pm
Location: The Crispin
Street: 3 Finsbury Avenue
City/Town: Moorgate, London, EC2M 2PA
Website or Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f…
Phone: 07584 488 691

The First Agile London Event - January 27th 2011 - Topics and Speakers needed!

Venue TBD, but somewhere in the City is for sure.

From Joel Jacobson, founder of Agile London:

"The first Agile London event is in the in the final stages of planning.  We are driving the event for January 27th 2011 and although we already have a number of prospective speakers we feel very strongly that this is a community-driven event and are extremely interested in hearing your views on the topics to be discussed at the event, whether this be problems you are facing adopting Agile within your team/organisation or just general topics that you are keen on meeting up with like minded Agilist's to discuss."

If you fancy joining the community and putting your name down for either of these events, click on either of these links:

• December meetup
• January event

Hopefully see you there!

My old* mate, Sylvain posted a link to Uncle Bob Martin's short portent-of-doom (ok, maybe just a "concerned warning" is more apt) around the trend for certification in Scrum and the potential affect on Agile adoption and credibility.

The thread on the same Agile London forum echoes those concerns, while my post on the potential secondary stage to the disease in the form of "Stand back, I'm an Agile Coach (cue drum role and massive daily fees)" takes the doom to a next level.

It's not all bad, yet. My feeling is that now might be a very good time to be taking back the power from the emerging elitists and re-focus on what agility, being lean, and embracing coaching-as-a-practice-everyone-participates-in-dammit.

* Apologies, I stand corrected. He's probably younger than me, but then again I'm ancient...

I have the immense pleasure of announcing that I am track host on the Enterprise Agile Transformation track at QCon in 2011. Check out the OpenCredo press release too.

I'm contacting some speakers now, trying to chase down some talks and synopsis, so please check out the track page for the latest updates as I get confirmations in.

In terms of 'just making sense', I've also had the opportunity to bring two communities together for the gig: QCon and Agile London. Joel Jacobson, founder of Agile London, will be joining me as Enterprise Agile Transformation track host so that the most can be made of the growing London-based community as we hit the QCon stage in March.

Exciting times!