Learning to Author

I just sent in my  latest contribution to the Cutter Business and Technology Journal. I guess I shouldn’t say “I” – I did it with two other authors, my good friend: Michael Ackerbauer and one of IBM’s Early Professional Hires, Nicholas Cariello.  I love collaborating with others when I write (or work on any project) – the ideas and concepts we come up just seem to emerge as the discussions progress

A bit of background: I’m part of the IBM Developer JumpStart team.  It a really cool program that is geared toward our new hire developers across North America. It’s a two year program that has them participating in various events to solve business problems, understanding how to publish patents, hone their public speaking skills and learn new technology through a number of labs. One of our other goals is to help these new IBM’ers to build their internal (personal) network. We try to get them to interact with a number of IBM technical leaders from around the company – which in a company like IBM is really important

My job is to worry about the education we deliver to these new hires.  One of the modules I really wanted to create was working with an experienced author to learn how to publish a paper.  Thinking twice about it however, a writing class just doesn’t seem that exciting (I mean some of these new hires are working on some of our newest technologies like our Quantum Computing offerings).

So, when I saw a call for papers from Cutter, I thought I’d use that an experiment to see if this could work. I reached out to all of new hires on a common Slack channel and asked if anyone was interested in working on a paper  (the topic of the issue was:  the Disruption of Agile methods). I got quite a few responses, and for simplicity, I chose to work with Nick since he was nearby here in New York.

When we met to talk about it, it just so happened Mike Ackerbauer was in the cafeteria that day and I invited him to sit with Nick and myself to discuss the topic. Within a few minutes we had Mike hooked and he became part of the “team”.  This was interesting (I think) for Nick – he got to see how two senior IBM’ers debated issues we see within the Industry and our own company when it comes to agile techniques – ok ok – let’s be honest: He got to hear Mike and I argue for hours ;-) but in the end come to a common agreement

So in the end it was great:  

•  Nick got some great experience with senior IBM’ers
• We got our paper published (Nick’s first)
• I think I validated that this could work (if I can find other IBM’ers willing do it as a mentor)

Great learning and experiences all around ! (let’s just hope the editors don’t rip us apart)