04.30.07
CITCON North America ‘07
This last weekend I attended CITCON in Dallas. Awesome. I had some amazing conversations, watched Bret Pettichord blow me away with customizing RSpec, actually met Elisabeth Hendrickson (and received a sweet green wristband that says, “test obsessed”), joined in a great conversation about what we are looking for in a testing language, and was surprised to discover there are people out there that actually like ant (to be fair, though, he does work on AnthillPro). The only downside was there were 2 topics at the same time that I wanted to go to, so I attended a talk on code metrics and missed out on the CI server cage match (There were like 6 different CI Servers represented at the conference, and they all got in a room to compare features and benefits of each).
If you’ve never been to a conference in an OpenSpace format, you’re really missing out. The short (-ish) version is that there are no preassigned speakers for the conference. On Friday, we all sat in a circle and people could write ideas down on a 3×5 card stating what they want to talk about. It might be some tool you want to show off, some concept you want to tell people, or, just as likely, something you know nothing about and what to learn. The only requirement is if you suggest the topic, you have to facilitate it and help get the conversation going.
After we had about 30 topics, we set them up on a board showing the rooms and time slots. Then, we go to the next room to drink and chat. As the night moved on, people we encouraged to wander back over to the schedule and rearrange topics, vote on what they want to see, and combine topics together. If you see two topics at the same time you really want to see, you just swap one of the topics with a different one so you can see them both. While you would think this would cause all sorts of problems, it turns out that, in general, people aren’t jerks, so you don’t get a constantly shifting schedule as much as a gradually improving one. A key element of OpenSpaces is the rule of 2 feet. If you don’t feel you’re getting the most out of a session, it’s up to you to walk to a better session. If you suggest a topic and nobody shows up (Actually happened for one of them), feel free to move to a different one. This puts the onus on you to get something from the conference. There are plenty of smart people attending, so if you don’t learn anything, you must have been actively avoiding conversations.
One of the interesting things is that the conference is free and takes place from Friday night to all day Saturday. The effect of this is the people that attend are doing so from a very real desire to learn. They are spending their free time to improve their craft and learn from their peers. It really raises the bar of the attendees. It’s amazing how much a difference actually caring about what you do can make.
Well, I guess that’s about it. There are 2 more CITCONs this year: CITCON Asia/Pacific 2007 in Sydney, July 27 & 28, 2007 and CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels, October 19 & 20, 2007. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go to the one in Brussels, (London 06 was just as awesome as this last one). If you’re in the area, I can safely recommend attending.
Final thoughts: When I first heard about CITCON, I focused on the “Continuous Integration” part of the name (which I didn’t have much passion around). I think it’s important, however, to understand that Testing, Agile, TDD and other xp-ish stuff are just as represented (if not more so). I’m glad I decided to go.