First of all: Excellent organization of the event – big THANK YOU to Thomas and Alex. Even vegetarian meals were covered đ ! Lot’s of interesting session discussions, floor discussions and evening discussions. Was really a pleasure (but exertive) to have that for a complete weekend with many competent peers.
Multiple sessions – “Schema-less DBs” and “ORM” – touched the relationship between .NET/OO/Client developers and database developers. I do observe that the data store is seen as a necessary evil when developing applications. My understanding is that it is more than a data tomb to dump some data in in a canonical manner. Multiple challenges we’re currently seeing in mainstream languages/environments – rich metadata, higher declarative tools to solve problems, resource management (CPU, Memory, IO), scalability, distributed topologies, parallelism, dealing with data in a set oriented manner – are solved in these database dinosaurs since decades. All in all a discussion that I would like to continue. It’s too important to use the right tool for the right job – even if 2 types of developers are involved. Finally: Did you know that database people (these inflexible guys with strange ideas…) do also discuss about topics like Agility and Refactoring?
A small session with 3, later 5 people was about “Getting things done“. A good part of the session the discussion circled around how to manage email traffic. Interesting enough as IMHO reading/writing emails is not the core competence of a software developer. We also touched Microblogging in the enterprise which triggered me to put that topic on the table again. How to manage blog reading etc. was another interesting part of the discussion. All in all a topic that could be continued in detail in a future Open Space as we all have to deal with information overload, information filtering and knowledge aggregation.
Some of my proposed topics “Administrative Toolsets”, The administrator as an additional further user” didn’t find enough interest to be discussed. I must admit that ‘client’ developers still don’t have these topics in their focus. But being able to provide manageable applications will be a key differentiator in the foreseeing future. Maybe these topics get a higher priority in future Open Spaces. I should be better prepared to talk about experiences I made, to come up with best practices, to propose the usage of frameworks and tools.
Still struggling if I should attend the next .NET Open Space in Leipzig, think I should…
Being Inquisitive 