This year I went to Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, next to Recife to attend Agile Brazil 2015 and have a few more meetings. As a long time organizer of the conference, I ended up not spending as much time watching talks as one usually does.

I did have the chance to attend 3 of the 4 keynotes, one open space session and a few other sessions along with a lot of meetings.

The first keynote was Linda Rising's "The Agile mindset". I had seen it before but any time you get the chance to hear Linda speaking, you should. I'm not reproducing everything here as Linda kindly provides her slides to anybody who wishes to reproduce her talks. In short, she explains how considering that intelligence or skill or ability is a fixed/genetic trait of any individual is damaging to our ability to improve. Based on scientific research, Linda explains that having a growth or Agile mindset is about believing that we get better by trying and putting in hard work. She explains that we can induce a given mindset with certain rewards, punishment and environment in general.

This was our "out of the box" keynote. Murilo is a famous Brazilian sailor. He told us his impressive story on how, by arrogance, he sank a friend's boat, almost killed his son, his friend and himself. As with most accidents, he described the many mistakes/situations that culminated in a near death experience for him and the horror of almost killing his son.

My takeaway from his talk is about respecting the basics of our profession or activity. In software, it means automated tests, refactoring, basic security (SQL/JS/etc injections, encryption, limiting access etc). For sailing, it meant ensuring equipment is available and working, that you are not multi-tasking and that no task is so small that it can be assumed to be taken care of.

Our Brazilian keynote was delivered by Alê Magno. It has been a long time that Alê has been working on learning. He explained that he is versioning learning methods.

Learning 1.0 is the type of learning in which the knowledge resides in a small amount of people that decide what should be taught to the students and know the correct answer. This is our typical school level education. The structure of knowledge in this case is very much a pyramid in which the top has the knowledge and pushes it to the bottom. The flow of learning is very clear. People take a class and learn then they go back to their jobs and apply those learnings. Work and learning are separate.

Learning 2.0 is the one in which there are experts who know the correct answer but the students pull the information according to their needs. The typical scenario is having consultants that have the answers and that are available to answer the questions. In this case, the structure of knowledge doesn't change much. The flow is slightly different in that learning and working are a little more interwined.

Learning 3.0 differs from the previous ones by not having a concentration of the knowledge. Learning happens by sharing and communicating with other practicioners and colleagues.