Software Craftsmanship 2009 - Request For Proposals

[Jason Gorman]

Dear Software Craftsman,

(Or should that be "craftsperson"?)

I'm delighted to announce that the Software Craftsmanship 2009
conference is open for business!

The Date: Feb 26th 2009

The Venue: BBC Media Centre, White City, London

Our Gracious Hosts: BBC Worldwide & BBC Backstage

We have two rooms, allowing us two simultaneous tracks of fun and
games relating to the business of BUILDING SOFTWARE RIGHT.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

This is a conference about the "hard skills" that programmers and
teams require to deliver high quality working software.

From writing effective unit tests to managing dependencies, and from
writing reliable mutli-threaded code to building robust and dependable
service-oriented architectures.

This conference is all about the principles and practices, and the
disciplines and habits, that distinguish the best 1% of software
professionals from the 99% who are failing their customers and failing
their profession by taking no care or pride in their work and
delivering buggy, unreliable and ummaintainable code.

This conference aims to showcase and champion the "hard skills", and
champion the idea of software craftsmanship and the ways in which it
can be encouraged and supported in the workplace, in schools and
colleges, and among the wider software development community.

This is a conference about building it right.

Thanks to the generosity of BBC Worldwide and BBC Backstage (both
organisations 110% committed to software craftsmanship, by the way),
registration is free. Registration will open on Dec 1st - yes, before
we even have a programme!

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS

Between now and Jan 7th, we are accepting proposals for sessions. The
exact style, format and length of sessions is being left open to
ensure we leave you enough creative freedom to come up with the kind
of innovative and challenging sessions I know you can. You could
propose a 15-minute crash course in avoiding race conditions in multi-
threaded code, or a 2-hour coding dojo on adversarial pairing. Or
maybe a 1-hour tutorial on the basics of model checking, or a 30-
minute presentation on how your organisation encourages and supports
software craftsmanship.

Okay, so there are some implied limitations. A 72-hour marathon
session on TDD in Ruby won't actually fit into the available time slot
for the conference. And a 30-minute session proposal is twice as
likely to find a slot than a 60-minute session proposal.

And we're have our little prejudices, of course. I'll be briefing our
excellent selection panel to favour sessions that gives delegates
hands-on, practical experience. So if you were thinking of doing a
PowerPoint on the success of coding dojos in your company, you might
want to turn that into a coding dojo to illustrate how you do it and
slip the exerience report into that context. Just a thought.

STAYING ON TOPIC

This is a conference all about the "hard skills" that are critical to
helping programmers create solid, reliable, dependable, maintainable,
scalable etc etc code. It is not a conference about specific
technologies, or about managing teams (unless that relates
specifically to encouraging and supporting craftsmanship), or about
planning or estimating or tracking projects. It's also not a
conference about processes or process improvement.

This is a conference about PEOPLE and the skills, knowledge,
practices, habits and disciplines that help them to deliver better
software.

So a session proposal like "An Introduction to Ruby on Rails" will
almost certainly get rejected. But "Ruby Refactoring Coding Dojo" may
well find a slot. And a session like "Delivering Business Value
through SOA" will probably end up on the cutting room floor, while
"Automated End-to-End Testing of Service-Oriented Architectures - A
Tutorial" would be in with a shot.

YOUR SESSION PROPOSAL

So we're deliberately keeping it as loose as we can. But there are few
things we definitely need to know about your session to enable us to
evaluate your proposal:

1. Who are you? (Your full name and contact details, and a brief blurb
about who you are and what you do)

2. What is the title of your session?

3. What is the style of your session (is it a tutorial, or an
experience report, or a pole dance etc?)

4. How long will your session need?

5. Who do you see participating?

6. What will they need to know before the session, and what might they
need to bring (e.g., a laptop, a copy of Visual Studio 2005, a pony,
and so on)?

7. What is the rough content/process of your session, with rough
timings so we can get a feel for how it will all fit?

8. What will you need to run the session, and what will you be
bringing yourself? (e.g., will you need a projector, flipcharts, a
camping stove or wotnot?)

9. What outputs do you envision from your session, and how will these
be published (e.g., on your web site, or on our web site?)

10. Have you run this session before? Do you have slides or outputs we
can look at?


SUBMITTING

Submitting a session proposal is easy. It should be in plain text (a
basic Word doc is fine, but no fancy suff because it'll just get lost
when I paste your proposal into our selection panel wiki).

Email your proposal to ja...@parlezuml.com

SCHEDULE

The selection committee will be beavering away evaluating session
proposals and we will meet several times to start fleshing out the
conference programme between now and the day when the final programme
is announced.

Deadline for session proposals is January 1st 2009.

The programme will be announced on January 7th 2009.

QUESTIONS

...can be directed to me :-)

Looking forward to reading your session proposal. Don't hesitate to
get in touch if you need any help.

Regards

Jason Gorman
Conference Chair
http://www.parlezuml.com

PS. The conference web site is on its way!