David Laribee

CEO & Cofounder, Nerd/Noir

hachyderm.io@laribee
twitter.com/@laribee

David Laribee is a coach, developer, teacher, international speaker, and co-founder of Nerd/Noir. Over the last 25+ years, he’s helped develop digital product development teams and organizations in a wide variety of industries, including banking, retail, technology, insurance, defense, and higher education.

David has been at the forefront of several movements in software development. He helped create the dojo approach to immersive learning, popularize lean and kanban methods, and introduce product thinking to the agile landscape. As an engineering leader, David was an early adopter and advocate of eXtreme Programming, Kanban and Domain-Driven Design. David is a former Microsoft MVP in both Solutions Architecture and C# and co-founder of the ALT.NET movement, which has spawned dozens of user groups across the globe dedicated to open-source and modern engineering practices.

Before founding Nerd/Noir, David coached the product development teams at VersionOne, a market leader in agile project management tools. These days you can find him working across several active dojos, collaborating with leaders on strategy, and helping to build capable coaching teams at Fortune 500 firms and hypergrowth startups. David started work life at the early age of five on a farm in Upstate NY — an upbringing that accounts for his lead-from-the-front approach, appreciation for small/cross-disciplinary teams, and appreciation for authentic maple syrup.

Hands-On Session

Creating Your Immersive Learning Playbook

An essential part of being an architect or staff+ engineer is coaching and mentoring other engineers and growing the talent and capability of teams and individuals. We've developed a lightweight playbook framework that makes this process repeatable and improvable. Playbooks combine learning objectives, leading and lagging indicators of improvement, outcome measurement, and sequencing learning paths of discrete plays into one handy reference.

In this workshop, I'll walk through our open-source playbook framework for technical coaching and teaching. Attendees will build a personal playbook on a topic of their choice. Previous examples have included: introducing DDD to a team, empowering teams to take over architecture and design, automating deployments with CI/CD, and improving the quality of delivered code.