XP2011 Day 1
The first day of XP2011 got off to a good start today. As your roaming reporter I think I will break down my experience of day one into the following categories: Conversations, Tutorials, & After hours.
Conversations
Starting your own conference – Beer in hand, I stumbled into a conversation about holding a future XP conference in Vienna. What a fabulous idea! I’m currently playing a small role in helping with site selection for a conference in the pacific northwest, so I’m particularly interested in this topic. Setting up a conference is a very complicated affair. It involves many different factors that I’m only now coming to appreciate: site location, catering, services (wifi, etc.) atmosphere, organization type, and the list goes on. The more I get to know people who take on this challenging task, the more I respect them and the work that they do.
On a related note, I see small conferences as a critical part of the overall conference ecosystem and a vital source of originality for the overall conference system. I see ideas get introduced and developed (0r killed) in small conferences that then evolve into the new ideas that pop up in the larger conferences. So I think we need to encourage more small conferences.
ALE Network – Those crazy Europeans are at it again! Being an American I didn’t participate, but I really like the energy that I feel behind this movement. I wasn’t in the super secret meeting, but I wholeheartedly support whatever those wacky Europeans come up with! Apparently they are going to take over the world with LEGOs. Let’s see if this movement has momentum. I know my kids are on board.
Vegetarians starve in Madrid – Yes, this is my exclusive scoop for the conference. I spoke with a few vegetarians tonight. Apparently there are no vegetables in Madrid. None. The poor bastards are starving. It’s quite sad. A moment of silence for the vegetarians please. The good news for the rest of us carnivores: vegetarians are really very tasty.
Tutorials
Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams w/Jutta Eckstein
This topic isn’t a new one for me. In fact, this session was one of those where you come to realize that you know quite a lot on the subject. Then the hard part is to balance letting the speaker talk with your own desire to contribute your own point of view. I also felt like there were some key points that I really needed to explore in much more detail, but perhaps that wasn’t as relevant to others in the room. I think Jutta did a great job in presenting a comprehensive overview of many of the key issues to address in working with distributed/dispersed teams. She obviously has a lot of experience in the domain and has written two books on the topic.
However…this topic is insanely complex and I think it deserves even more attention than it currently gets. The real questions that I encounter with distributed teams are wicked hard and they don’t give way to simple, stock agile answers. Strangely enough, when she addressed trust the conversation started to sound a lot like the introduction to my Silo Busting tutorial – so I invited her to come! I think trust is a very important and under appreciated topic for inter team communication.
The Other Session
I have a confession to make. I saw myself in the second session today and I felt more than a little uncomfortable. The speaker was skilled – he really had a talent for speaking to a crowd, but you could see that the ideas were still being worked out. I saw a bit of myself in that speaker today and quite frankly, it made me feel awkward. I will not criticize – to do so would only be to criticize myself. But at the same time I wanted so badly to jump up and help out. Sometimes the hardest sessions to attend are those where the potential of the speaker and the subject are the most obvious. I’m still processing my feelings on this one. Perhaps this is more about me and less about the speaker. Hmmm…food for thought.
So I took a nap.
After Hours
Welcome Reception
Well, after the obligatory speeches from boring people you’d rather not listen too, the beer poured freely and the tapas kept coming. It was a relatively small crowd as these things go, but it kept going for a good three hours. It was nice to drift in and out of some very engaging conversations. I talked about everything from basketball, to ice hockey, to Madrid weather, to sessions held today, to the future of the Agile Manifesto (I think we agreed that after 10 years those particular stone tablets should be smashed). All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening with a drink in each hand.