Slides from Wednesday and Thursday

Now the slides from Wednesday and Thursday is available on the QCon website. Just find the desired talk on the schedule and if the slides for that talk is available, there will be a link to where you can download them.

That is; if you need to find the slides from the talk about “A Kanban System for Software Engineering” by David Anderson, you should go to the schedule and select Wednesday and there they are.

If you twitter – does that mean that you are a twit?

One of the greatest things about going to QCon is that you can meet all the fantastic speakers in a very informal setting. Last night I was having conversations with people like Joe Armstrong, Steve Vinoski, Jonathan Trevor and Kresten Krab Thorup in the hotel bar and that was fantastic – I learned a lot.

The twitter remark that I used for the title is actually a question that Steve Vinoski asked me and because twitter is not that popular in Denmark, I just can’t tell. I do not use twitter – I use the status message in Facebook for that kind of information and that is what most of my friends do.

I asked around at the conference and there was some real twitter fans there but there was also the people who just thought that twitter was blogging taken too far. So if you are a twitter fan or a twitter hater, I would like to hear your opinion.

Pictures from the second day of QCon

Kent Beck at the keynote today

The man in the QCon-green suit is Kresten Krab Thorup, CTO at Trifork.

How XP are you?

I really liked the questions that Rachel Davies asked the audience in her “Agile Mashups”-session. It was very informative to hear the answers.

One of the questions was “How XP are you?” and specifically:

Can you claim to be a XP-team…

• if you don’t use index cards?
• if you don’t write code test-first?
• if you don’t program in pairs?
•  if you don’t sit together?
• If you don’t have an onsite customer?

What do you think?

Pictures from today

The registration this morning:

The welcome by Floyd from InfoQ and Kresten from Trifork:

Eric Gamma talked about Eclipse and moving from a closed source project to an open source project with the same team.

Linda Rising from the Agile track introduced the other speakers in the track:

Today – agile in practice

Today I have chosen to follow the agile track with Linda Rising as track host.

There are several great speakers in this track which include Linda who always works the topic from a funny angle – today it was the angle of cycles and it sparked a great discussion about sleep cycles and work cycles. I really learned something very useful that I can take with me home – human beings work/sleep best in 90 minute periods and therefore it is best to do everything in multiples of 90 minutes. And regarding work it is important to take breaks and to focus on one thing at a time and several of the audience members had statistics backing up that statement.

Of course even though I agree that you should concentrate on the tasks at hand, I actually took notes and blogged while I was in the audience of this talk, so I do not quite live up to that.

Blogging “live” from QCon London 2008

Hello everybody!

This is a blog set up only to blog about QCon London 2008 organized by Trifork and InfoQ. My name is Therese Hansen, and I will blog about the conference as I see it and contribute to the pool of blog posts from participants in QCon. I am from Denmark so please forgive me when I make writing errors.

The biggest downside of such a conference is that you cannot attend every session. There will be things that you miss out on even though it interests you. So I blog and others can read what I experience at the conference and I read other blogs to see what I missed.

I’ll see you around at the conference