You are now more agile! AgileDevPractices 2013
I’ve just came back from AgileDevPractices conference that was held in Potsdam. As for the first edition of the event I must say it worked out well. Meeting people from different organizations and discussing different issues is always a learning opportunity.
This time it was also an opportunity to do a bit of marketing too, making people aware of this awesome Ruby on Rails software shop in Krakow. In fact, given that people at AgileDevPractices understand what agile approach to building software is, they should like working with us even more.
Anyway, the event started with a workshop day and I had a chance to run a full-day Kanban workshop for a small, but awesome group of people. Instead of making this simply an introductory course to Kanban, I decided to focus on Kanban being a driver of continuous and sustainable improvements. It was a lot of fun and, basing on feedback I’ve received, a decent occasion to learn, too. By the way, if you want to see a summary, here are Peter Saddington’s notes: part 1 and part 2.
There was quite a good mixture of topics among conference talks, and one thing I specifically liked was a strong focus on testing and quality assurance stuff. Interestingly enough, the talks I liked most were those that were neither about agile nor development nor practices. My personal highlights of the event were Hass Chapman’s session showing how strongly we are rooted in hunters / gatherers history of homo sapiens and Peter Saddington’s keynote on behavioral patterns and understanding what makes us tick.
I will be boring with this one, but the best part of any conference is always networking, and this time it wasn’t different. Hours of talking about different topics, trying to chew trough new ideas and make them fit into a bigger picture of current experience is like sharpening the saw. Everyone should do that.
Then there is this awesome experience when you finally meet people you knew from Twitter or blogs for years, but this time they are in their real form, you know, humans, not avatars. The group of friends is bigger again. And I have a couple of ideas concerning who we should invite to the next year’s ACE! conference, too.
On the top of that I carved some time out to meet a couple Lunar Logic alumni in Berlin: Olga and Marek. In fact, it was even better as I flew with Olga to Berlin so we had even more time to chat about good old times at Lunar. It seems that if you worked in Lunar some time ago you can expect me stalking you some time in the future.
The last day of the conference started with my keynote on efficiency and busyness. It went very well both in terms of feedback I got and the number of questions, which is always a good indicator whether people got involved. If you’d like to see slides, here they are:
All in all, the trip to Potsdam and Berlin was definitely worthwhile. I already have a couple of fresh ideas that I want to try out in Lunar. And I hope to see that crowd there next year.