As many of you have known for a while, I’ve been running my AgiliTrain training company focusing on technologies like Silverlight, WPF and the Web. My interest in training isn’t going away, but I’ve yearned to work with a small group of thought leaders to help companies in more innovative ways. With this goal in mind, I am launching Wilder Minds.

The vision for Wilder Minds is to be a complete solution for companies who are trying to move to new technologies (like Windows 8, HTML5/JS, Mobile Development, node.js, etc.) Instead of just doing training, we’re expanding to help in three primary ways:

• Training (like we’ve always done)
• Development
• Coaching

Training

Wilder Minds is still focused on training. We are still building and teaching our courseware as we did as AgiliTrain. This hasn’t changed. We have adapted to the changing way people are taking training and suspending our publically-held courses. We won’t be doing our “Tours” any longer, but we will continue to teach our courses (and custom courseware) as clients request them. In addition, we’re continuing to build courses for PluralSight and do some remote classes. Training is still a major focus of this new venture.

Development

This might sound like a similar story to a lot of other companies, but our focus is to improve development teams, not replace them. Improving the skill sets of developers is what we’ve always done, but the development and coaching are new. Our goal is to help companies build projects where it helps the existing teams. This may be building proof-of-concepts or exemplars. It also means building the first version of a product that the company doesn’t have time to wait for the team to get up to speed. It is imperative to us to make sure every line of code we deliver is of exceptional quality. This is of particular importance to use as we think even our development work is an opportunity for teaching. We know the best way to improve developers is to get them to work with exemplarity  code. In our opinion, that’s the best way to mentor coders.

Coaching

Coaching, on the other hand, is our answer to traditional consulting. The problem with the word ‘consulting’ is that it’s become synonymous with contracting or being a head-count shop. When we talk about coaching, it’s an opportunity to work directly with clients to help them with planning, architectural and code reviews as well as question and answer sessions. It’s a way for us to take our expertise to clients directly for short stints to help them over key technical hurdles.

What about AgiliTrain?

Well, AgiliTrain is morphing into Wilder Minds. All the old AgiliTrain urls now forward directly to the new company. If you’re an existing AgiliTrain client or student, nothing changes…except for the name.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me via our contact page:

http://www.wilderminds.com/contact