Terry Ryan
Author of 'Driving Technical Change'
Terry Ryan is a Worldwide Developer Evangelist for Adobe. The job basically entails helping developers using Adobe technologies to be successful. His focus is on web and mobile technologies including expertise in both Flash and HTML. Previous to that, he spent a decade working in various technical roles at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Terry is also the author of Driving Technical Change, a Pragmatic Bookshelf title. It's about convincing reluctant co-workers to adopt new tools and ideas.
He blogs at http://terrenceryan.com/blog and is tpryan on Twitter.
Presentations
“That's really useful, but it looks like it was designed by a developer.”
Ever heard that? Want to fix it? Think you don't have design ability?
Here's a dirty little secret, design is a skill, it can be learned. This session will take you through the basics of design theory for applications. By the end you should be on your way to building not just useful apps that people have to use, but awesome apps that people love to use.
Topics to include:
- Design Dos and Don'ts
- Planning a Design
- Design Fundamentals
- Layout
- Typography
Ever been to a conference, get inspired, try to bring what you learned back to the office, only to be stymied by co-workers who aren't interested in rocking the status quo? It turns out that people tend to resist change in patterns, and like any pattern they can be overcome by using other people's experiences with those skeptics. This session will teach you how to identify the skeptics, how to counter them, and give you a strategic framework to convince your whole office.
This session will go into detail in the patterns and techniques of Driving Technical Change including:
skeptic types, countering techniques, and master strategy using those techniques to achieve change in your organization.
Using Adobe's AIR technology, you can target multiple device platforms at once: Windows, Mac, Linux. However more recently, BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android, TV platform, even IOS support have been added to AIR . That is in addition to the desktop and web environments you can target. This session will show you why you take notice of AIR, and how you can simplify writing applications the deluge of devices, and honest information about when AIR is appropriate and inappropriate for your task.
Topics discussed will include:
- AIR for desktop systems
- AIR for devices
- Abilities of AIR on respective systems
- Pros and cons of AIR
- How to develop and deploy to different platforms
- Real world examples
Books
Driving Technical Change
by Terrence Ryan
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Your co-workers' resistance to new technologies can be baffling. Logical arguments can fail. If you don't do politics, you will fail. With Driving Technical Change, by Terrence Ryan, you'll learn to read users' "patterns of resistance"-and then dismantle their objections. Every developer must master the art of evangelizing. With these techniques and strategies, you'll help your organization adopt your solutions-without selling your soul to organizational politics.
Finding cool languages, tools, or development techniques is easy-new ones are popping up every day. Convincing co-workers to adopt them is the hard part. The problem is political, and in political fights, logic doesn't win for logic's sake. Hard evidence of a superior solution is not enough. But that reality can be tough for programmers to overcome.
In Driving Technical Change: Why People On Your Team Don't Act on Good Ideas, and How to Convince Them They Should, Adobe software evangelist Terrence Ryan breaks down the patterns and types of resistance technologists face in many organizations.
You'll get a rich understanding of what blocks users from accepting your solutions. From that, you'll get techniques for dismantling their objections-without becoming some kind of technocratic Machiavelli.
In Part I, Ryan clearly defines the problem. Then in Part II, he presents "resistance patterns"-there's a pattern for each type of person resisting your technology, from The Uninformed to The Herd, The Cynic, The Burned, The Time Crunched, The Boss, and The Irrational. In Part III, Ryan shares his battle-tested techniques for overcoming users' objections. These build on expertise, communication, compromise, trust, publicity, and similar factors. In Part IV, Ryan reveals strategies that put it all together-the patterns of resistance and the techniques for winning buy-in. This is the art of organizational politics.
In the end, change is a two-way street: In order to get your co-workers to stretch their technical skills, you'll have to stretch your soft skills. This book will help you make that stretch without compromising your resistance to playing politics. You can overcome resistance-however illogical-in a logical way.