So far I attended 2 .NET Open Spaces in Leipzig and the 1 in Ulm. I did also attend multiple community conferences. And I must say: Again I got a full package of experience, motivation and a couple of ‘navigation helpers’ where to look into (technically). These kind of un-conferences really work exceptionally well!
- Topic Release Management: We had a session to share the Dos and Don’ts when doing product versions an patches. People in the session are facing similar issues as we see them in our company: Too less tool support, no common sense practices, too less attention on the whole topic. @lennybacon is doing some work in that area to bridge the gap that VC-systems, build servers etc. still keep open, I do really welcome that!
Beside the tool aspect I could imagine that a Wiki sharing approaches and practices, listing Pros and Cons could help to come to a higher professionalism level in Release Management. There is a lot of noise and cloudy ads on the net, but do you know a resource that really helps to guide with the most basic things in Software Business?
- A lot of small talks and sessions were about the non technical aspects of doing software development – communication topics, project management topics and the psychological aspects of working together in a team. I got a lot out of it to use it in my daily life as an enterprise developer and as a (wannabe) change agent. It’s astonishing how open, experienced and inquisitive a group of nerds discusses these ‘meta’ topics, a group that is seen as ‘autistic’ sometimes. For the project management topic: I’m surprised again and again on developer conferences, how deep developers are in the field of agile methods, scrum and the like. Sometimes I would wish that I could say the same about the project manager group.
- @sforkmann gave an inspiring talk about CQRS using F#. Ok, I think F# will not be a topic for my project work for the foreseeable future. But each time I hear about CQRS I feel I understand a bit better, what it is, what it’s good for and – that I do it (partially wrong) since some time now. I really learned a lot in this session.
One last note about the community topic here: I really like to see a lot of known faces again on conferences like this, known from the net or personally. On the other hand: Could it be that it’s becoming a more and more closed club of 150..200 people hanging around together again and again? Could it be that topics like Ruby, node.js, monads (arbitrary terms here) keeps some people away? I wish these conferences could provide everything – a market place for advanced ideas, a place to attract new people and a place to build and grow the community.
Being Inquisitive 