The annual XP Day Benelux conference took place last week in the small Belgian town of Mechelen, a stone's throw from Brussels. As you may know, I attended the conference and also ran two sessions.
Consider this my personal field report from XP Day Benelux 2006.
WEDNESDAY
We arrived at the Brussels airport after 6pm local time with Markus. The ever-so-thoughtful Pascal van Cauwenberghe picked us from the airport by car, which was a huge help as we didn't have to try and figure out the train connection to Mechelen nor worry about the taxi driver knowing where we need to go.
After dropping off our bags at the Elewijt conference center, and a short panic due to us (mistakenly) thinking our power adapter plugs wouldn't fit the local outlets, we headed to the Mechelen fish market for a dinner. We met more people at the fish market and set out to find a nearby restaurant to feed 10 hungry and thirsty agilists.
We continued the nice dinner table discussions back at the Elewijt center after a short walk in the quiet streets of Mechelen, joining other conference delegates preparing for their upcoming sessions. True to our "Yesterday'sLast Conferences' Weather", me and Markus decided to invest in socialising with fellow delegates first, leaving the preparations for our Coding Tournament until after midnight.
Note to self: Remember sustainable sleeping hours during conferences.
THURSDAY
The conference started with a rush to set up our room for the Coding Tournament, which was going to take place right after the opening plenary. We were having a lot of trouble getting all computers on the wireless network but things were looking good enough for both of us to attend the opening plenary.
Coding Tournament
Our agile-spirited one-minute advertisement for the Coding Tournament during the opening plenary lured some 15 people to our session. Being still a relatively fresh Mac-convert, I soon noticed a rather interesting ratio of hardware among the participants--more Macs than PCs! But I digress.
Out of the 15 or so people, five pairs continued developing their implementations and participated the final tournament at the end of the session. While we ran the final tournament successfully and found a clear winner among the five competitors, the session certainly wasn't without its problems.
We again had problems with getting the participants' computers connected to the server and vice versa and ended up copying the different implementations on the server machine with USB keys. Next time, we'll opt for the fallback sooner if it seems like the network stuff isn't working properly. There was also a problem with the Ruby XML-RPC client code, which apparently was related to running against "localhost" vs. a normal IP address.
In any case, we managed to get all implementations joined to the final tournament and watched from the screen as the participants' genius poker algorithms were facing off. Some with more success than others.
The lunch was being served in the atrium as we wrapped up our session and gathered all the equipment, which was nice because we had skipped breakfast in an attempt to maximize TTW (Time-To-Wakeup). The lunch consisted of a mix of hot soup, bread filled with all sorts of good stuff, and a variety of yoghurt and pudding. I think that kind of a standing lunch is perfect for this kind of a conference. It's a lot easier to mingle and move around when you're not tied to a seat in a table...
Getting Things Done
The first afternoon session proved that we should've prioritized Time-To-Wakeup over socializing with other delegates. Both me and Markus decided to attend Bernard Vander Beken's session on David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) method. The session was quite good as I hadn't managed to really look into GTD before (beyond knowing the basic idea of having a "tickler" file). Bernard described how GTD could be implemented in practice, answering very knowledgeably to all kinds of questions from the audience. If you've been thinking about adopting GTD, maybe your next action should be attending Bernard's session on GTD...
And, yes, the "next action" pun was intentional.
Unfortunately, the combination of shorter than usual sleep, just having eaten lunch, and lack of oxygen, I wasn't exactly "fully aware" all of the time and decided to take a power nap before the closing plenary and conference dinner.
Conference Dinner
The conference dinner was served in the conference center. The food was quite good and the dessert chocolate even better. Most importantly, however, it's always fun to chat with people you only meet a couple times a year at such events. At some point, realizing that most people had already left the dining hall, we too headed towards the bar.
The conference center's bar was carrying a bit unusual beer mats, shaped like pieces of a puzzle, which, combined with Belgian beer and the company of Conan the jolly Dubliner, led to the creation of the main feature of the night. The Beer for Sphere project.
FRIDAY
Friday started much more relaxed than Thursday. We actually made it to the breakfast before the opening plenary!
Turning Up The Heat
My Friday morning started with Joseph Pelrine's and Ben Fuchs' session titled "Turning up the heat (without getting burnt)". We explored team dynamics through a cooking metaphor of a team being in any of several states ranging from solidified to stagnating to cooking to burning and how we might be able to tune the "heat" and affect the team's dynamics using a number of "knobs" such as changing the roles within the team, increasing/decreasing external pressure, and so forth.
Already the first 30 minutes gave me some insights about certain events from past consulting gigs that I hadn't thought of. I highly recommend attending the session if you get the chance. Joseph and Ben will be presenting it also in the London XP Day conference, for example.
Resistance As A Resource
While I had managed to wake up early enough to grab a good breakfast, I decided to postpone lunch until the last responsible moment. The reason being that I needed to arrange the plenary room's furniture for my Resistance as a Resource workshop that was going to take place there right after lunch. I didn't need to do it all by myself, though, as Cedric, Pascal and someone else (Rob, was it you perhaps?) helped out. Also, Pascal's and Vera's Presentation Zen session was going to take place in the same room after my workshop and they were going to use the same table layout so there was no need to move the furniture back after the workshop. A big relief!
I created the Resistance as a Resource workshop based on Dale H. Emery's excellent Resistance as a Resource game. To my and Dale's best knowledge, the game hasn't been run in a public conference like the XP Day ever, anywhere. That made it all the more exciting, of course, both for me as the session organizer as well as for Dale as the inventor of the game itself.
I started the session with a story of a past encounter with a somewhat strange case of resistance to the idea of unit testing by a programmer. The reason for sharing the story with the group was to help everyone transition into the proper mindset of thinking about resistance.
Next, I described Dale's Resistance as a Resource game and its simple rules. I also explained how the rest of the workshop would be spent. And we didn't follow that plan, by the way.
After explaining the rules of the game, we split the group randomly into four tables and started brainstorming with a stack of index cards and coloured whiteboard markers. After some 15 to 20 minutes, the groups seemed to be slowing down so we mixed it up a bit by sending three people from each group to the other tables. Each table restarted brainstorming by first explaining the cards they had organized on the table. The three new people in each table clearly revitalized the discussions. We did a total of three such iterations before it was time to wrap up.
To wrap up the session, I asked the teams if they'd like to create posters of their creations and they whipped up four colourful flipchart papers we hung up on the atrium wall for the rest of the conference delegates to investigate.
It was exciting to observe the teams busy brainstorming possible reasons and responses to different forms of resistance they had observed. I'm already anxious to run the session at the upcoming conferences in Hamburg and London.
Presentation Zen
I had planned to attend the Presentation Zen workshop in the last slot in the schedule before the closing plenary. I missed most of the session, however, due to a sudden need to bok a hotel room from Brussels (we thought we'd have a room until Saturday morning but we didn't). We did sneak in to follow the session from the back of the room, however, after sorting out our accommodation.
The organizers of the Presentation Zen workshop had slightly underestimated the time they need for the multiple rounds of presentations. Luckily, the program committee had happened to schedule the workshop in the last slot before the closing plenary so the workshop participants could present their creations to the whole conference. What a coincidence! :)
All in all, the participants of the Presentation Zen workshop were clearly having a lot of fun. Too bad that I couldn't participate myself. Although me and Markus did get a mention in Conan's team's presentation.
Closing Plenary and Farewells
All session organizers still present got handed a bottle of local (Mechelen) beer during the closing plenary. Nice! It was also nice to hear people sharing a couple of words about the different sessions they had participated.
After the closing plenary, a few beers in the bar, and dozens of farewells, we headed out to Mechelen with a small group for a quick dinner before people had to leave for their trains, buses and airplanes.
It was a good conference, although I did miss a lot of potential fun being a session organizer myself. I'm hoping to see some of the nice folks at the conference also in Hamburg and London, and I'm certainly looking forward to attending some of the same sessions I missed in Mechelen!
I'll try to write up a similar story about the upcoming XP Day Germany and XP Day London. Until then...