Last Saturday I attended the Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2011 conference in Glasgow.
The event itself was exceptionally well run, timing was like clockwork and you didn't see anyone running around trying to find the right video adapter for their laptop. It's incredible that such a well run event can also be free. The only minor problem was the lack of air conditioning, which meant enduring a tropical climate for popular sessions.
Personally I haven't had to code for .NET for anything serious since 2007, so I'm not overly keen on attending sessions on ASP.NET or about the latest library being reproduced for c# programmers. This has proved tricky at previous DDD conferences I've attended where you have no choice but to attend a .NET based session. Thankfully this conference proved to accommodate with sessions where the programming language wasn't important.
I started the day off at an open discussion event hosted by Craig Nicol on "Professional Development". There were only a few of us at the session but it was a wonderful way to wake up at 9am while discussing what we all considered traits of a professional developer. Craig guided the session by using a mind map already containing the BCS definition of professional development. Colouful anecdotes were retold by the session attendees and it was good to hear about the working environments of others.
Feeling inspired, I then headed along to Gary Short's presentation on "Asymptotics and Algorithms". Gary himself was part of an ongoing Twitter drive-by that ended up with a satirical twitter profile being created in his honour. Not that I want to feed inflated egos' but this session was brilliantly done. Gary clearly knew his stuff and had that knack of taking something complicated and making it simple to understand.
After lunch I attend the BDD with F# session. I was under the impression that F# was similar to Clojure, but I couldn't of been more wrong; there wasn't a single piece of parenthesis in the entire talk!
The final session for me was Chris McDermott's introduction to Kanban development. In the session Chris went over the important parts of Kanban and then discussed how he could have used the methodologies practices in his past. The idea of evolutionary change over time, rather than using a change everything approach is very compelling. I'll keep this talk in mind next time I have to introduce an agile change in an organisation.
I met up with Chris, Rob Lally and a few others at Thai Lemon Grass for a post conference meal. The meal like the conference was excellent. I can't thank the Scottish Developer community enough for making this day happen.