rebelutionary / 2.0

CITCON London 2006 Write Up / 2006 Oct 11

Friday and Saturday I had a great time at CITCON London (note - before I turned up I presumed it was pronounced 'sit-con' - like citrus - but apparently it's 'kit-con').

It was my second experience of an "OpenSpaces" conference after RCC in Portland, and I must say I really like the format. As long as there's a small number of dedicated people, it works brilliantly. As another participant said in the wrap up session, you really feel like you're participating in the conference rather than just being talked at by some spruik with a PowerPoint deck.

I won't write up detailed session notes here (you can find those online) but throughout the conference I wrote down small choice quotes and tidbits from the sessions I attended.

Learnings

• On the integration of code, "XP is all about pain. The idea is if something is painful, do it often enough that it's not painful anymore"
• Cyclomatic complexity actually can be useful as a simple red flag indicator for classes you should examine - ie look at the top 5%, if they're major outliers rewrite them.
• Jeff recommended a book: No Excuses Management the story of Cypress Semiconductor
• JDepend and JayWalker were both dependency analysis tools people raved about.
• One of the ThoughtWorkers recommended Key Promoter an IDEA plugin that displays the shortcut key combination for any command you execute using the mouse in big text ( useful for pairing and learning keyboard shortcuts).
• Jeff mentioned the karate concept of "su-ha-re" in relation to the understanding of learning XP, but I can't seem to find any Google links on it. Help needed!
• Virginia Satir's work on why people stay in abusive relationships too long was related to why people don't change bad teams in a work environment. Amused me :) I love crazy parallels.
• I think the Extreme Hour is something we should do at work to improve team's XP skills.
• Another book recommendation (not sure who from - sorry!) was Michael Cusumano's The Business of Software

For all the sessions titles, you can also see the full session board online:

Beyond that, I managed to get a few good JIRA plugs in using only a t-shirt, I look like I put Jeff to sleep at the end of my build telemetry session and if you look through the photos carefully enough you just might get a few Bamboo teaser screenies ;)

A great conference overall - well done to Jeff and Paul - fantastically organised and I look forward to the next one, in Sydney in February!

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