JAOO... day 3

Here it is my comment about wednesday.. a bit late.

Wednesday was my free day; I didn't have to do any crew work. So I enjoyed the conference all day. I skipped the keynote. Not because it was not interesting, but because I had to do some reading for my thursday exam, and I couldn't skip that!
During the day I attended four sessions in the Developer Best Practices track, and one in the Scaling Agility track. In this last one I had the pleasure to listen to Jeff Sutherland talking about distributed scrum, together with Guido Schoonheim, who was exemplifying fully distributed scrum witha project in his company that has scrum teams where half team is in Holland and half team is in India. And it has been working for them.. impressive!

The sessions about developer best practices were really interesting, specially the ones from Frank Buschmann and Kevlin Henney. Considerations for designing and coding, and the Henney's "Programmer's Dozen", with 13 recommendations. These two talks were fresh, they didn't feel long eventhough they were full of code samples, full of humor... amazing! I recommend to any programmer to go through the slides of the dozen and see if they recognize some of the things we do wrong all the time. The other sessions I attended in this track were Real-world Refactoring and TDD 2. The former was interesting, with good slides and a good speaker, but after the first two, it didn't seem that great... And the latter was not that good, it felt too long and too sleepy, but we got a laugh when James Coplien made his comment at the end of the session, leaving the speaker without any chance of answering it!

After the last day of conference, the crew had a retrospective, making a time line of what had happened during the conference; all the things that were great and all the things that could be improved. Lot of feedback for the JAOO team.
And then.. the expected Crew + Speakers dinner :) Great food, great wine (we got white Catalan wine ;-) ), great music and great company. I think it is a very good idea to let the crew mix with the speakers... it's a good chance to talk to them, beer in hand. Unfortunately I left just after the dessert, as I had exam the day after and I was really tired already.

Thank you all for a fantastic JAOO, I had a great time!

JAOO... day 2

Tuesday at JAOO was full of great talks! I could go to three of them in the morning, but I had to do some crew stuff in the afternoon. Only for those three talks, the conference was worthy to me :)
I listened to Frank Buschmann talking about Architecture Reviews first. The talk was targeted to software architects and architecture reviewers. I'm not none of these, but listening to this man is always a pleasure, and you get something out of it!
Then Linda Rising, talking about The Power of Retrospectives... wow! I could listen to her for hours and hours. Great sense of humor, and she is really passionate about retrospectives, even suggesting to apply the technique to your own life; stop and reflect what can be done differently to make your life better... I'll keep this in mind :)
Last but not least, I went to Cope's talk about Agile Architecture. There was so many people that he is repeating the talk today, because some people couldn't go in! I had to leave before he finished, due to my crew duties, but I really enjoyed the talk. Fresh and provocative as always.

The afternoon was a bit boring... I had to guard one of the conference rooms, and then sit at the registration office for like 2 hours.. and no one came! Well, that's the price for going to the conference!

Today it looks exciting.. I have problems deciding which talks to go to! More about it later.. or tomorrow!