Workshop March 23th gets 4 out of 5 stars! | Android Labs.

As every year, the most fun part of devoxx for me is to see the Java Posse guys. These guys are awesome and I am a big fan.

What? You don’t know the Java Posse? Well, time you do!! The Java Posse is a Java Technology podcast with lots of news, interviews, opinions and fun stuff.

This time we (Regina and moi) decided to show the “Posse” some Duchess love by creating a banner. We acted (and looked) like a bunch of groupies ;) We knew that we where not the only “Posse” fan out there, so for us to be assured of a seat on the front row, we sat down there the session before (boring JPA talk, but ala….). Fun was that more people thought the same, and normally you notice people leaving the conference rooms during the talks, but now people where dripping in during the talk before the posse’s show. We kept a seat reserved for Yolande because we knew how big the row would be outside the room just before the show would start. The show started as we realized we didn’t grab our “free atlassian beer” and so did Jackie Wall (wife of Dick Wall 1 of the posse guys) who was sitting next to us. She was so kind to provide us from beer. As reward we donated her a Duchess t-shirt. We had a blast together. There was also a “hat” contest. Everyone with a hat could win a free subscription to parleys.com. Some guy with a yellow hat won it, he deserved it as I saw him wearing that hat during the whole conference.

Rest me to say, subscribe to the Java Posse podcast (e.g. itunes) and have fun!

Duchess loves Java Posse (picture taken by @JackieWall)

ps: The show at Devoxx is recorded and will be available soon as a Java Posse podcast. I also have posted this one on our Duchess site.

The idea was beautifully executed by designer Vincent Voorduin of Dutch Designs.

By the end of every week, all the hours must be filled in and my task was to remind everyone about it. So I started to sent reminder emails. It didn’t help much (they weren’t reading the email at all) and people started to dislike me my role.

After a few “standard” email reminders I started to change the content of the email. First of all I changed the standard “pushing” text like: “….you MUST fill in….” to something like: “…PSSSSST….this is Lucia, your personal reminder….” and also provide some project information like project codes etc. Second, every week I took a funny picture of myself and put it in the email and composed it with a nice HTML layout.

And guess what? It worked out great! They didn’t forget to fill in their hours (at least less people did) and they started to like me my role again. I remember sending that first email and hearing some people giggling and asking others if they had read my email.

I thought that after a few weeks it became “normal” again and that my colleagues would fall back into not reading it at all. But….I was wrong. One week I was in a hurry and did not take a new picture and used the picture of the week before. I started to get response of my colleagues that they where looking forward to see a new funny picture of me and that I was “cheating” by putting in an old one!

So being creative and putting in some fun paid off 

Most people aren’t productive because they don’t take action. They have dreams and even plans – but they don’t follow through. Negative thoughts can derail action. It may be that you have doubts about your ability, or that you listen to others who doubt you.

Tip: Look at what you would like to achieve and ask yourself, “What is the smallest step in the direction of my dreams that I can take right now?” Then take that baby step. Now.

Read more on How to be Insanely Productive and Still Keep Smiling from Mary Jaksch (on Zenhabits).

Hat tip: Laurens Bonnema

Zaterdag 6 november vindt WordCamp weer plaats in Utrecht.

Meer informatie vind je op WordCampNL.org.

Photo walk Kasteel de Haar. Go to: digitalluus for a slide show.