Beijing is a big, big city with a great deal of history, many beautify buildings and crazy taxi drivers! I was invited to do some training in Beijing by OutSofting’s Julien Mazloum.
Not only did Julien graciously invite me to Beijing, but he was also kind enough to show me around the Forbidden City. In todays world of massive sky scrappers and larger than life construction projects it would be easy to dismiss a 600 year old imperial palace … but that would be a mistake. The Forbidden City is impressively large even by today’s standards. I’m sure when it was first constructed and revealed to the world it would have been daunting and inspiring at the same time.
During the course, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of course participants who spoke both English and Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese (much to my embarrassment) so their help and guidance was invaluable and helped the class run smoothly. The course participants were friendly, kind and full of good humor. Interestingly, the User Story template that I use “As a … I want … So that …” translates almost directly into Chinese. There’s a snapshot of the Chinese User Story template in the gallery below along with photos of the participants and some of their work.
