This document outlines a presentation about the personal and professional journey of two developers, Jon Bowers and Michael Lihs, who collaborated on a project in Cambodia while sharing insights on sourcing services and the impact of cultural exchanges. It highlights their experiences working with the Cambodian company Web Essentials and discusses the benefits of Agile methodologies like Scrum in managing complex projects. The document also touches on personal growth, lessons learned, and the ongoing collaboration between the two companies, emphasizing the importance of fostering relationships and continuous learning.

1. Inspired to Share –
A Personal Journey

2. [Annotated version]
This is an annotated version of the talk we held
at the T3CON14EU in Berlin.
During the presentation we only used the slides
with the images. The white slides were added
later to make the presentation more valuable
without what’s been said by the authors during
their talk.

3. Get up!
• Look each other in the eyes
• Smile
• Say “Hello!”
• Say one thing you like to the other
person

4. Jon Bowers
@jonbowers100
Michael Lihs
@kaktusmimi

5. [MIMI]
•34 years old from Karlsruhe, Germany
•Working at punkt.de as a TYPO3, PHP and in the
meantime Ruby developer
•Married, no kids
•Passionate about cycling, climbing, travelling,
photography, guitar making and playing
•Recently fascinated by what’s called DevOps
[JON]
•20 years IT sales
•Move to Cambodia 6 months ago
•Recently moved into a new house with my wife, 2
daughters, a dog, one turtle, two hamsters
•Met Mimi in Cambodia
•Like fishing

6. Sourcing Services

7. [JON]
• We want to put up personal face on sourcing
services
• I realized during the research for this talk, that
I am a “product” of this
• My father is partly Tchek and Irish
• My mom is Japanese
• Met, because my great-grandfahter came to
America to build a railroad back in the 1800s
• Global sourcing has a very personal
attachment for me

8. Web
Essentials
www.web-essentials.asia
• Open Source
• Average age 24 years
• Constant innovation
& motivation
• Family values
• Social Impact

9. Some facts about the
Kingdom of Wonder
• 15 Mio people
• Among 50 poorest countries
• Before 1970s “Switzerland of SEA”
• 19% live on less than 1.25$ per day
• Khmer Rouge genocide 35 years ago
• 50 % under 25 years old

10. punkt.de
www.punkt.de

11. [punkt.de]
•Mimi has the privilege of working at a company
•Engages their developers to take the lead
•Sends them to all kind of events around the world
•We are doing
•Complex TYPO3 customer projects
•Hosting
•No short term projects but long lasting
customer relations
•Currently we are re-writing our hosting portal
in a project called “Codecoon”

12. Personal Motivation
• Asian TYPO3 Conference 2012
• Experience outside Germany
• Share from my experience

13. [Personal Motivation to go to Cambodia]
•Why did I want to do this
•Met Dominik Stankowski (CEO of Web Essentials)
at the T3CON 2011 in San Francisco
•Attended the T3CON Asia in 2012 in Phom Penh
•Met Kaspar in Phnom Penh, talking about sharing
things
•What he said about what he did with TYPO3 inspired
me a lot

14. Introducing Codecoon

15. [Introducing the Codecoon Project which we
partly out-sourced to Web Essentials]
•Idea: Offer a Platform-as-a-Service for Web
Developers
•Relieve the developer from all hassle with
•Hosting
•Development environments
•Deployment
•Integrate hosting and development environment
•Make things (as) easy (as possible)
•You can read more on www.codecoon.com

16. Collaboration Profile
• 2 Developers sent to Cambodia
• Managing the developer teams
• 2 teams of 3-4 developers from WE
• 3 months
• Working with SCRUM

17. [The Collaboration Profile]
•Before the collaboration, we set up a plan of how
it could work
•2 developers from punkt.de were planned to bring 2
projects with them to Web Essentials
•One “customer” project (make a TYPO3 CMS website
responsive)
•One “internal” project  Codecoon
•They should work with 2 of Web Essential’s teams
•Each team consisting of 3 – 4 developers
•The collaboration should last for 3 months
•As both companies worked with SCRUM, we wanted to
use SCRUM for the collaboration, too
•We will see later, why SCRUM helped us far more than to just
“organize” the project

18. Two Companies –
Common Values
• Commitment to TYPO3
• Serious about Agile
• Dedicated to quality
• Developing people
as well as software

19. [Two Companies – Common Values]
•What does punkt.de and Web Essentials have in common besides
both being a software company?
• A deep commitment, not only to TYPO3 as a product, but also to the
TYPO3 community
• Jürgen Egeling – the CEO of punkt.de – was the former president of the TYPO3
association
• Dominik Stankowski – the CEO of Web Essentials is now member of the EAB
• Punkt.de organized the first TYPO3 conference in Karlsruhe in 2006 (and many
of the conferences in the years to follow)
• Web Essentials organized the first TYPO3 conference in Asia, in Phnom Penh in
2012
• Both companies send their employees to TYPO3 Code Sprints
• Both companies are “living” the agile manifesto
• Individuals and interactions -- over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
• For both companies, it’s important to develop their people and their
teams and not just to develop some software
• We believe that in developing our people, this will have an immediate impact
on the work they are doing and hence on the quality of the delivered software

20. How punkt.de does
SCRUM
• 2 week sprints
• Dedicated PO and SCRUM Master
• Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence)
• Transparency

21. [How punkt.de “does SCRUM”]
•We have 3 teams
•Each team has a dedicated PO
•Each team (except one) has a dedicated Scrum Master
•We are working in 2 week sprint cycles
•Fixed days for retrospective, planning and sprint start
•We use the Atlassian toolchain (Jira, Confluence) for
documentation, requirements engineering, customer
collaboration and planning
•Full transparency
•Customers have their own Jira accounts
• See all the tasks of their projects
• See the currently running sprints
• Can use Jira to prioritize the tasks for upcoming sprints
• Are part of the review and acceptance workflow
•Customers can see exactly how much time was spent on their
projects
• On a per minute basis
• On a per issue/ticket basis

22. How Web Essentials
does SCRUM
• 5 working days (1 week) sprints
• Dedicated PO and SCRUM Maste
• Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence)
• Transparency

23. [How WebEssentials “does SCRUM”]
•Compared to punkt.de there are only slight
differences
•5 working days sprints
•Collaboration in Jira
•With customer (which is a company that runs a
project for an end-customer)
•Or end-customer (if the customer wants us to do
that)
•We use a lot of stickies 

24. The Team

25. [The Codecoon Team]
•Had a big team at home that worked on the
project before and during the collaboration
•During the time in Cambodia, we had a team of
3 developers from Web Essentials
•We also had support from the TYPO3
Community
•Sebastian Kurfürst
•Karsten Dambekalns
•Steffen Gebert
•Christian Trabold

26. The Journey starts
• 11hrs flight
• “It really started”

27. [How did it feel like to arrive in Phnom Penh]
•Arriving in Phnom Penh at ~30° after boarding the
plane during winter temperature in Frankfurt
•driving with the TukTuk
•Realizing that now I am “on my own”
•Doubts raised
• Can I really do this
• How will it feel like to be 3 months in this country that I only knew
from a 2 weeks holiday
• Will I be able to fulfill the demands on the project and the
expectations from the people who sent me
•Not much time to “transition”
•Take the plane in well-known Germany
•Get dropped of in a completely different world 11h
later
•Transition was even worse when flying back home

28. How it feels like
• Put your shoes out
• Riding TukTuk
• Special breaks and
Playing Ligretto
• Lunch on Wednesdays
• 36° outside vs. 18° inside

29. [How was it like to work at Web Essentials]
•Doubts vanished immediately by entering the door of the
office
•I knew some people from the conference(s)
•It was a very “warm” welcome
•As a developer, all it needs is a laptop and an internet
connection
•Many things are different
•You mostly walk bare feet in the office (something I like a lot!)
•Soon learned to appreciate the “special breaks” when it was
someone’s birthday
•Morning breaks at 10 o’clock, when the whole company came
together in the kitchen
• Playing Ligretto
•Eating together on Wednesdays – food cooked by the own staff
in the own kitchen
•High temperatures outside, low temperatures inside
• Although many employees did not have air conditioning at home, they
turned it down to the MIN at the office
• I was freezing – if I turned it up a little, they told me, it would be so hot

30. Challenges
• Language & cultural barriers
• Project management skills
• Cross-Continental review and delivery
• Complexity of the project

31. [Challenges – for Web Essentials]
•Welcoming and settling the customer in the company
•Find a nice place to live in Cambodia
•Taking them out in Phnom Penh
[Challenges – for Mimi as a visitor]
•Both, Germans and Khmers don’t speak English as a native language
•Huge difference in the culture
• Cambodians are very much afraid of losing face
• They do not ask questions if things are unclear
• “Afraid” of strangers, takes a while to get close
•I did not do project management at home
•Now I had to do it
• Was made easier as I knew SCRUM
• Did not have to come up or get used to a new process
•A big question was, how to “send” increments back home
• We had no finished Continuous Delivery pipeline at the beginning

32. Problem Solving
• SCRUM was already established
• Retrospectives as “safe place”
• Technical & non-technical aspects

33. [How we overcame the problems & challenges]
•SCRUM is great for team development
•Developing software as well as teams
•Retrospectives as a great tool for team
improvements
•Issues seem often to be technical but often,
they are non-technical
•Once we solved the communication and non-
technical issues, technical issues to solved as
well
•Both is part of SCRUM for me
•“Not only project management, but team
management as well”

34. Breaking down…
• … Epics
• … into Tasks
• … into Subtasks
• visualize progress
• and write tests for it

35. [Breaking down tasks…]
•Break down things to make them
comprehensible and to have progress
•With small tasks, you can see immediately if things
get stuck
•Visualize tasks and progress on a board
•Write tests to make sure that things which
once worked still work if you change something
•Enables you to do refactoring
•Should have had more tests
•We lost quite a lot of time with regression bugs

36. Continuous Delivery
• Testing and Deployment chain
• Being able to deliver often
• Being able to deliver early
• Complex infrastructure

37. [Continuous Delivery]
• Sending someone several thousands of kilometers away with a project,
means you want to get feedback on how it’s going
• We did not have a deployment chain right from the beginning
• Which was one reason why it took us ~4 weeks until we could deliver our
increments for the first time
• This is not was SCRUM supposes you to do
• Besides Review and Feedback, automated testing is also part of the
deployment chain
• We had too many regression bugs
• No end-to-end tests that helped us to make sure that “the whole thing” still
works
• Normally you have one project you deploy on one server
• We had 2 websites
• Neos website
• Flow management portal
• Depending on a Chef server that needs to be provisioned
• Depending on a Chef node that needs to be connected to the chef server
• A server in a box that runs on a client machine
• Hence “out-of-your-control”
• Lots of virtualization stuff that we never had any experience on how to test
it before
• Everything needs to work with each other or the product breaks

38. Lessons learned
• Focus on smaller increments
• Deliver increments faster
• Development vs Project
Management
• Clarify roles
• Code Review Workflow

39. [Lessons Learned – The Developer’s View]
•On such a complex project, you cannot do everything at
once
•Work on one part at a time
•Really finish it, before going on
•Don’t get lost in details, figure out in your team what is
really important
• Prioritize!!! Clarify Roles
•Customer vs. Developer vs. PO
•As a project leader, you cannot work as full-time developer
•Code review is a great tool, not for “control”, but to give
specific feedback to your developers
•Can be done distributed, like Sebastian Kurfürst was doing it
in Germany and still helped us in Cambodia
•Is a great proof, that people who did not write the code are
still able to understand it

40. The WE view
• Infusion of new ideas & tools
• Learning how to manage high
level of complexity
• Learning from very experienced
developer
• Learning to do Agile better

41. Business Benefits 1
• Neos Marketing Website
• Styling for Management Portal
• User management in TYPO3
Flow
• Chef recipes

42. [The “hard” outcomes of the project]
• On the previous slide, you see what we
actually implemented

43. Business Benefits 2
• Offering “something special”
• Relationship has started
• Feel comfortable with more
responsibility, calmer
• More confidence in making own
decisions

44. [The “soft” outcomes of the project]
•Our CEO at punkt.de wants a company were people
decide on their own  you have to learn this!
•I made my own decisions and saw that it worked  more
confidence
• Punkt.de wants to be a company were people can make their own
decisions
• You have to give your people a space to learn the abilities of
making decisions
• My journey to Cambodia was a very extraordinary space to learn
•Punkt.de is a small company, flat hierarchies
•No big “careers”
•No huge salaries
•But  offer travels and chances to learn things and see the
world  something special
•We set up a relationship between the two companies
that goes on
•Source out another customer project in fall 2014
•Gain new resources

45. Lasting impressions
• Eating things I never did before
• Motivation to learn
• Dedication to the company
• Commitment of expats

46. [Lasting Impressions]
•Besides all the work-related stuff, there’ve been a lot of
impressions on this journey that will stay in my mind
•Meeting wonderful and inspiring people
• be it at the company
• Friends of the company
• People on the street and along my journeys
•Meeting people and working with people that have the
biggest motivation to learn things
• That worked on Sundays and holidays just because they were
curious for the project
• Had a really high dedication to the company which surely was kind
of a family to them
•Meeting “Expats” (people who left their western country,
comfort and safety to live in Cambodia)
• That really had an incredible strong commitment to what they
were doing
• People who truly believed in what they were doing
• People who made and make a change

47. What’s next
• Sebastian is bringing another
project to Cambodia
• Codecoon went online at
T3CON14
• Focus on family and life at home
• Ongoing developer exchange

48. [Web Essentials]
•The collaboration between punkt.de and Web Essentials
continuous
•A second project is on the way and will start by the end of
October
•With Sebastian going to Web Essentials again for 3 months
•We both hope that it is possible to set up an ongoing
developer exchange between our two companies
•Web Essentials developers are already visiting Code Sprints for
Neos
[For punkt.de]
•The Codecoon project went online with what we called the
“first milestone” at this conference
•We hope that many people are interested in what we offer so far
•Maybe there is another chance to collaborate in this project
•I won’t have the chance to go back to Cambodia for a longer
period of time any time soon

49. Call to Action
• Do something special.

50. [From Mimi’s perspective]
•I was into guitarmaking before being a developer
•In Instrument making as well as in many over handcrafts:
Tradition of the Walz
•Did not do that during the time of being a guitarmaker
•What I did in Cambodia felt much like being on a Walz to me on
a retrospective
[From Jon’s perspective]
•You have to do it yourself -- Initiation to becoming a master
is something you have to start on your own
•Learning that making your own decisions works
•Offering that to your own employees
•Maybe go to Web Essentials maybe to someone else
•The TYPO3 community is a great pool of companies for
exchange
•We exchange a lot of software – why not “exchange people”

51. Thank you!
• Welcome to our team!

52. Sign up to T3CON15
Asia August 2015