Hi all, I thought I'd start a thread here so that everybody can share their impressions of SCNA 2009 in one place rather than scattered over the web and Twitter. My goal is largely to close the feedback loop with regard to the conference.
My impressions: - I enjoyed getting to speak to Ward about wikis and the Wave protocols; the importance of discernment (or an ability to appreciate and articulate quality in code) before people can build better systems; web-based code review (such as the open source Rietveld: http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ and Google's Mondrian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc ) as a form of pair programming that leaves a history that others can learn from. - I got a chance to meet lots of people that I either have never met in real life (like Laurent Bossavit and Corey Haines) or don't get to meet very often (like Dave Hoover and Fred George). Getting a large portion of the community in one room was one of the biggest benefits of this conference and I suspect the overlap with Agile 2009 played a big part in that. I hope that next year's SCNA conference is also able to do the same thing. - It felt good to see people like Robert Martin and Michael Feathers being surprised by how knowledgeable our little community is. They both had sessions where they found out that we know more languages and have a deeper appreciation of computer science than the average developer. I had an enlightening conversation, with someone whose name I've forgotten, about what it would be like to play Go on a sphere or a torus and the equivalence between Hamming distance and Manhattan distance for binary strings. - I found once again that this community is composed of people who like well-made artefacts. Many people seemed to be carrying iPhones, MacBooks, moleskines and high quality pens. - On a less pleasant note I was surprised by how few women attended SCNA when compared to conferences like XPDay or even the Software Craftsmanship conference organized by Jason. This conference also seemed to have more people who self-identified as Ruby programmers than the London conference and I hope that this had nothing to do with the gender skew. - I was terribly pleased to see Jim Weirich talking about connascence and Meilir Page-Jones. Authors like Page-Jones, Riel ( http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ObjectOrientedDesignHeuristics ) and Bertrand Meyer are largely forgotten but their knowledge is still valid even with today's languages. There were multiple references to SICP and Michael Feathers managed to cover a large amount of a self-taught comp-sci degree in 45 minutes. I think the only thing he missed was the new edition of Cormen's algorithms book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262033844
There are a few changes I'd make for next year's SCNA. It should either be a single track conference (there always seemed to be something really interesting going on next door) or there should be more time for people to exchange knowledge between sessions. This might mean that SCNA should be over 2 days. I would also like to see more room for feedback and adaptation during the conference. One technique that the Python and Perl communities have been using for a few years is to have the last afternoon of the conference consist entirely of lightning talks.
Another idea would be to have a room set aside for people to pair program. I would love to have watched Ward and someone like Fred George pair program. Think how much we could all have learned by spending some time coding with each other at SCNA.
I think the conference would also have benefited from keynotes by relative outsiders such as McBreen and Sennett. If we're going to advance the state of the craft then we have to find other communities to learn from. For instance there's a fire house near the conference hotel and I spent some time there asking them how they spread knowledge about new techniques given that the stakes are so high. It turns out that after every engagement they hold a retrospective; they question everything; they constantly devise and evaluate new techniques; they train each other in new techniques as well as seek out opportunities to anticipate new situations such as new architectural fashions; new techniques are proven at a local level before being slowly disseminated and verified by other houses and finally everybody is expected to be able to use every tool but they accept that some people will always be better with certain tools.
Finally I'd like to thank all the people who put together this great little conference. Your hard work is appreciated.
Thanks for the writeup Ade. We're going to be gathering feedback in
the coming weeks and devising a plan for SCNA 2010. We're already
discussing single-tracking and stretching it to 2 days, with more
unstructured time and space for collaborative coding.
On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Adewale Oshineye<adew...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I thought I'd start a thread here so that everybody can share their
> impressions of SCNA 2009 in one place rather than scattered over the
> web and Twitter.
> My goal is largely to close the feedback loop with regard to the conference.
> My impressions:
> - I enjoyed getting to speak to Ward about wikis and the Wave
> protocols; the importance of discernment (or an ability to appreciate
> and articulate quality in code) before people can build better
> systems; web-based code review (such as the open source Rietveld:
> http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ and Google's Mondrian:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc ) as a form of pair
> programming that leaves a history that others can learn from.
> - I got a chance to meet lots of people that I either have never met
> in real life (like Laurent Bossavit and Corey Haines) or don't get to
> meet very often (like Dave Hoover and Fred George). Getting a large
> portion of the community in one room was one of the biggest benefits
> of this conference and I suspect the overlap with Agile 2009 played a
> big part in that. I hope that next year's SCNA conference is also able
> to do the same thing.
> - It felt good to see people like Robert Martin and Michael Feathers
> being surprised by how knowledgeable our little community is. They
> both had sessions where they found out that we know more languages and
> have a deeper appreciation of computer science than the average
> developer. I had an enlightening conversation, with someone whose name
> I've forgotten, about what it would be like to play Go on a sphere or
> a torus and the equivalence between Hamming distance and Manhattan
> distance for binary strings.
> - I found once again that this community is composed of people who
> like well-made artefacts. Many people seemed to be carrying iPhones,
> MacBooks, moleskines and high quality pens.
> - On a less pleasant note I was surprised by how few women attended
> SCNA when compared to conferences like XPDay or even the Software
> Craftsmanship conference organized by Jason. This conference also
> seemed to have more people who self-identified as Ruby programmers
> than the London conference and I hope that this had nothing to do
> with the gender skew.
> - I was terribly pleased to see Jim Weirich talking about connascence
> and Meilir Page-Jones. Authors like Page-Jones, Riel (
> http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ObjectOrientedDesignHeuristics > ) and Bertrand Meyer are largely forgotten but their knowledge is
> still valid even with today's languages. There were multiple
> references to SICP and Michael Feathers managed to cover a large
> amount of a self-taught comp-sci degree in 45 minutes. I think the
> only thing he missed was the new edition of Cormen's algorithms book:
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262033844
> There are a few changes I'd make for next year's SCNA. It should
> either be a single track conference (there always seemed to be
> something really interesting going on next door) or there should be
> more time for people to exchange knowledge between sessions. This
> might mean that SCNA should be over 2 days. I would also like to see
> more room for feedback and adaptation during the conference. One
> technique that the Python and Perl communities have been using for a
> few years is to have the last afternoon of the conference consist
> entirely of lightning talks.
> Another idea would be to have a room set aside for people to pair
> program. I would love to have watched Ward and someone like Fred
> George pair program. Think how much we could all have learned by
> spending some time coding with each other at SCNA.
> I think the conference would also have benefited from keynotes by
> relative outsiders such as McBreen and Sennett. If we're going to
> advance the state of the craft then we have to find other communities
> to learn from. For instance there's a fire house near the conference
> hotel and I spent some time there asking them how they spread
> knowledge about new techniques given that the stakes are so high. It
> turns out that after every engagement they hold a retrospective; they
> question everything; they constantly devise and evaluate new
> techniques; they train each other in new techniques as well as seek
> out opportunities to anticipate new situations such as new
> architectural fashions; new techniques are proven at a local level
> before being slowly disseminated and verified by other houses and
> finally everybody is expected to be able to use every tool but they
> accept that some people will always be better with certain tools.
> Finally I'd like to thank all the people who put together this great
> little conference. Your hard work is appreciated.
I definitely support single tracking. It broke my heart to have to select
one session over another, the quality of the talks and the speakers were so
high. If a session is worth having it should be worth everyone seeing
it. (Maybe this is something that goes wrong as conferences grow larger --
a kind of session creep, the conference gets too diffuse.)
Thanks for the write-up and the photos, Adewale.
On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Dave Hoover <dave.hoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the writeup Ade. We're going to be gathering feedback in
> the coming weeks and devising a plan for SCNA 2010. We're already
> discussing single-tracking and stretching it to 2 days, with more
> unstructured time and space for collaborative coding.
> We're listening. And excited!
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Adewale Oshineye<adew...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I thought I'd start a thread here so that everybody can share their
> > impressions of SCNA 2009 in one place rather than scattered over the
> > web and Twitter.
> > My goal is largely to close the feedback loop with regard to the
> conference.
> > My impressions:
> > - I enjoyed getting to speak to Ward about wikis and the Wave
> > protocols; the importance of discernment (or an ability to appreciate
> > and articulate quality in code) before people can build better
> > systems; web-based code review (such as the open source Rietveld:
> > http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ and Google's Mondrian:
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc ) as a form of pair
> > programming that leaves a history that others can learn from.
> > - I got a chance to meet lots of people that I either have never met
> > in real life (like Laurent Bossavit and Corey Haines) or don't get to
> > meet very often (like Dave Hoover and Fred George). Getting a large
> > portion of the community in one room was one of the biggest benefits
> > of this conference and I suspect the overlap with Agile 2009 played a
> > big part in that. I hope that next year's SCNA conference is also able
> > to do the same thing.
> > - It felt good to see people like Robert Martin and Michael Feathers
> > being surprised by how knowledgeable our little community is. They
> > both had sessions where they found out that we know more languages and
> > have a deeper appreciation of computer science than the average
> > developer. I had an enlightening conversation, with someone whose name
> > I've forgotten, about what it would be like to play Go on a sphere or
> > a torus and the equivalence between Hamming distance and Manhattan
> > distance for binary strings.
> > - I found once again that this community is composed of people who
> > like well-made artefacts. Many people seemed to be carrying iPhones,
> > MacBooks, moleskines and high quality pens.
> > - On a less pleasant note I was surprised by how few women attended
> > SCNA when compared to conferences like XPDay or even the Software
> > Craftsmanship conference organized by Jason. This conference also
> > seemed to have more people who self-identified as Ruby programmers
> > than the London conference and I hope that this had nothing to do
> > with the gender skew.
> > - I was terribly pleased to see Jim Weirich talking about connascence
> > and Meilir Page-Jones. Authors like Page-Jones, Riel (
> > http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ObjectOrientedDesignHeuristics > > ) and Bertrand Meyer are largely forgotten but their knowledge is
> > still valid even with today's languages. There were multiple
> > references to SICP and Michael Feathers managed to cover a large
> > amount of a self-taught comp-sci degree in 45 minutes. I think the
> > only thing he missed was the new edition of Cormen's algorithms book:
> > http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262033844
> > There are a few changes I'd make for next year's SCNA. It should
> > either be a single track conference (there always seemed to be
> > something really interesting going on next door) or there should be
> > more time for people to exchange knowledge between sessions. This
> > might mean that SCNA should be over 2 days. I would also like to see
> > more room for feedback and adaptation during the conference. One
> > technique that the Python and Perl communities have been using for a
> > few years is to have the last afternoon of the conference consist
> > entirely of lightning talks.
> > Another idea would be to have a room set aside for people to pair
> > program. I would love to have watched Ward and someone like Fred
> > George pair program. Think how much we could all have learned by
> > spending some time coding with each other at SCNA.
> > I think the conference would also have benefited from keynotes by
> > relative outsiders such as McBreen and Sennett. If we're going to
> > advance the state of the craft then we have to find other communities
> > to learn from. For instance there's a fire house near the conference
> > hotel and I spent some time there asking them how they spread
> > knowledge about new techniques given that the stakes are so high. It
> > turns out that after every engagement they hold a retrospective; they
> > question everything; they constantly devise and evaluate new
> > techniques; they train each other in new techniques as well as seek
> > out opportunities to anticipate new situations such as new
> > architectural fashions; new techniques are proven at a local level
> > before being slowly disseminated and verified by other houses and
> > finally everybody is expected to be able to use every tool but they
> > accept that some people will always be better with certain tools.
> > Finally I'd like to thank all the people who put together this great
> > little conference. Your hard work is appreciated.
Great writeup! I was sadly unable to make it this year but hope to
attend next year. I particularly appreciated the reference to the
local firehouse, which sounds rather similar to how things worked in
my experience as a combat engineer platoon leader (naturally there was
doctrine and plenty of reference manuals, but the actual practices
that work in the field were shared among peers using a technique much
like the one you describe, and of course the retrospective (or AAR -
after action review) was constantly applied there as well.
On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Adewale Oshineye<adew...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I thought I'd start a thread here so that everybody can share their
> impressions of SCNA 2009 in one place rather than scattered over the
> web and Twitter.
> My goal is largely to close the feedback loop with regard to the conference.
> My impressions:
> - I enjoyed getting to speak to Ward about wikis and the Wave
> protocols; the importance of discernment (or an ability to appreciate
> and articulate quality in code) before people can build better
> systems; web-based code review (such as the open source Rietveld:
> http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ and Google's Mondrian:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc ) as a form of pair
> programming that leaves a history that others can learn from.
> - I got a chance to meet lots of people that I either have never met
> in real life (like Laurent Bossavit and Corey Haines) or don't get to
> meet very often (like Dave Hoover and Fred George). Getting a large
> portion of the community in one room was one of the biggest benefits
> of this conference and I suspect the overlap with Agile 2009 played a
> big part in that. I hope that next year's SCNA conference is also able
> to do the same thing.
> - It felt good to see people like Robert Martin and Michael Feathers
> being surprised by how knowledgeable our little community is. They
> both had sessions where they found out that we know more languages and
> have a deeper appreciation of computer science than the average
> developer. I had an enlightening conversation, with someone whose name
> I've forgotten, about what it would be like to play Go on a sphere or
> a torus and the equivalence between Hamming distance and Manhattan
> distance for binary strings.
> - I found once again that this community is composed of people who
> like well-made artefacts. Many people seemed to be carrying iPhones,
> MacBooks, moleskines and high quality pens.
> - On a less pleasant note I was surprised by how few women attended
> SCNA when compared to conferences like XPDay or even the Software
> Craftsmanship conference organized by Jason. This conference also
> seemed to have more people who self-identified as Ruby programmers
> than the London conference and I hope that this had nothing to do
> with the gender skew.
> - I was terribly pleased to see Jim Weirich talking about connascence
> and Meilir Page-Jones. Authors like Page-Jones, Riel (
> http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ObjectOrientedDesignHeuristics > ) and Bertrand Meyer are largely forgotten but their knowledge is
> still valid even with today's languages. There were multiple
> references to SICP and Michael Feathers managed to cover a large
> amount of a self-taught comp-sci degree in 45 minutes. I think the
> only thing he missed was the new edition of Cormen's algorithms book:
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262033844
> There are a few changes I'd make for next year's SCNA. It should
> either be a single track conference (there always seemed to be
> something really interesting going on next door) or there should be
> more time for people to exchange knowledge between sessions. This
> might mean that SCNA should be over 2 days. I would also like to see
> more room for feedback and adaptation during the conference. One
> technique that the Python and Perl communities have been using for a
> few years is to have the last afternoon of the conference consist
> entirely of lightning talks.
> Another idea would be to have a room set aside for people to pair
> program. I would love to have watched Ward and someone like Fred
> George pair program. Think how much we could all have learned by
> spending some time coding with each other at SCNA.
> I think the conference would also have benefited from keynotes by
> relative outsiders such as McBreen and Sennett. If we're going to
> advance the state of the craft then we have to find other communities
> to learn from. For instance there's a fire house near the conference
> hotel and I spent some time there asking them how they spread
> knowledge about new techniques given that the stakes are so high. It
> turns out that after every engagement they hold a retrospective; they
> question everything; they constantly devise and evaluate new
> techniques; they train each other in new techniques as well as seek
> out opportunities to anticipate new situations such as new
> architectural fashions; new techniques are proven at a local level
> before being slowly disseminated and verified by other houses and
> finally everybody is expected to be able to use every tool but they
> accept that some people will always be better with certain tools.
> Finally I'd like to thank all the people who put together this great
> little conference. Your hard work is appreciated.
> Another idea would be to have a room set aside for people to pair > program. I would love to have watched Ward and someone like Fred> > George pair program. Think how much we could all have learned by > spending some time coding with each other at SCNA.
This is a fantastic idea. Can it be recorded? Being able to review a Fred George / Ward Cunningham pairing session would be invaluable.
Seriously, it is just boggling my mind how awesome that would be.
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