We wrote a book for hackathon! It’s called “So you want to be a scrum master?” and is on LeanPub. It’s for those that want to be a scrum master 🙂
But why a book? Why during Hackathon?
We run a few hackathons each year at work. We started the activity as a good way of giving the team the time to be creative, solve tech problems, explore new languages, network, grow relationships and all of this within the scope of it helping the company in some way.
Each hackathon I’m amazed with the level and quality of work produced. It’s incredible.
But hackathons are typically for coders – there’s a clue in the title. What about all those people who don’t code though?
Some join the coders and provide testing, design or project management style skills. Some continue with our everyday work. Some take the time to learn and develop.
This time around a few of us got together and creating a book for scrum masters. It’s a free book that has a wealth of ideas, thoughts and wisdom from the agile community here at NewVoiceMedia. It’s not preachy. It’s not dogmatic. We made it clear from the start we didn’t want that.
Instead, we hope it’s a good, valuable, informative and interesting read for those new to scrum mastery, or those looking to take on this interesting career.
Some facts:
- We wrote, edited and published the book in just 48 hours.
- There were 7 of us involved in the book. Helen Lisowski, me, Martyn Frank, Raji Bhamidipati, Steven Mackenzie, Weronika Kędzierska and Keith OSullivan
- We drew all of the pictures ourselves 🙂
- We have a lot more to add, we may do that for the next hackathon, or drip feed out over the next few months.
- We used LeanPub to write and distribute the eBook.
- We used Canva to design the front cover.
- We used Trello to organise the editorial content.
- We used HipChat for team chat.
- We used Hangouts for team gatherings.
- We used Hemingway app to get our writing tight, neat and easily readable.
It was an exciting hackathon and we were publishing right up until the wire!
So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Some people are even suggesting they should pay for the book!
If you have the desire to pay for the book, then please consider donating to Naomi House (NewVoiceMedia supported charity) instead. That would be most welcome.
Or download, read and enjoy the book for free.
We do hope it is the helpful resource we set out to create.
You can get the book here.