Last Friday I attended the XP Days Germany 2006. As promised, this is an experience report from the conference.

Thursday

My flight landed at the Hamburg Fuhlsbuttel airport soon after 1pm on Thursday afternoon. Markus had a separate flight because we were going to go to different directions after the conference. I arrived at the Hotel Wedina around 2pm and was pleasantly surprised of the atmosphere of the hotel. I learned that the room (in the red building of Hotel Wedina) had no Internet connection but that wasn't a big deal this time.

Frank promised me a quick sightseeing tour around Hamburg before the pre-conference meetup at the Landungsbrucken but since the weather wasn't so nice and the sightseeing train was out of order, we ended up just taking a regular S-bahn train to Sternschanzen where we were supposed to meet Markus (not the same Markus, Markus from compeople AG). The three of us headed to a Thai restaurant, which turned out to be a poly-asian cuisine restaurant offering not just Thai food but also Korean, Chinese and Japanese food. I really enjoyed the dinner discussion which was relaxed, not too much work-related, and we even coined a new term: Torstenized.

After the excellent Thai dinner, we headed towards the Landungsbrucken for the 9 o'clock meetup. By this time, the compeople Markus had decided to see the new Bond movie but the Reaktor Markus had also arrived to Hamburg and was asking directions from the hotel to the Landungsbrucken. We eventually picked up Markus, a fellow JavaRanch moderator Ilja, and Horst.

We walked a bit around the Reeperbahn, learned some new German words, and picked up Jurgen Ahting along the way, eventually settling down to a bar that looked big enough to host us and the horde of people on their way from the conference center where they had had some pre-conference evening session on Grails.

After several Weissbier, an interesting discussion with Jurgen about Second Life, me and Markus finally decided that it's time to grab some quality fast-food and get some sleep before the conference.

Friday

We arrived at the conference center a bit late but still just in time for Johannes Link's keynote. As the keynote was about to start, I tried to scan through the audience for familiar faces but couldn't see too many foreigners. Me, Markus and Dave Nicolette were the only three "aliens". Because the keynote was in German, which neither me nor Markus understands too well, we decided to step outside and go prepare our workshop instead.

Coding Tournament

Me and Markus ran the Coding Tournament session now for the third time. This time, we didn't really need to prepare all that much for the session. Well, there are some things on the to-do list but none of them were considered urgent enough to replace beer with coding ;) We simply carried our stuff to the room some 45 minutes before the session to configure and connect our laptops.

In Belgium, we'd had significant trouble getting all computers see each other through the wireless. In Germany, there was no sign of trouble as the organizers had set everything up better than U.S. Marines take care of their "girlfriends". There was plenty of switches to provide a local area network for a dozen or so computers and the cables were even rolled up nicely for easy access. They even had computer speakers ready for playing the tournament with sounds (the "live commentator" gives a rather unique touch to watching the game!).

We had (again) five teams furiously developing their bot implementations. Most people were using Java but we also had one Ruby bot competing for the title. The only glitch was that we had to run the final tournament twice because the first run found a bug in the server, causing an endless loop... In any case, the winning bot was eventually resolved and the two computer games found their way to the authors of FrankAndreas.

Developer Awareness

After lunch, the English-speaking track had an interesting session by Shamsuddin Butt, a psychologist from Butt Consulting. The title of the workshop was "Developer Awareness." The fundamental idea behind the workshop, deriving from Timothy Gallwey's concept of the Inner Game, was to illustrate how our two "selfs" affect our ability to function effectively.

Mr. Butt eased us into the topic with a nice physical exercise involving a circle of people throwing tennis balls across to each other. We basically formed a circle where each individual had two contacts on the other side of the circle: one person who throws balls to you and one person who you throw the balls to. We did three rounds of throwing balls, trying to improve the throughput of the system--how many balls we can pass through the hands of each individual standing in the circle in a given amount of time. Between the different rounds, we could clearly see a difference in how we were able to improve our throughput by focusing on the essential instead of trying to let "self 1", the controlling self, coordinate our actions on behalf of the "doer" Mr. Butt called "self 2".

We also had another exercise where Mr. Butt asked for someone who's always been bad at ball games and someone who's always been good at ball games. The exercise was basically about the one who's not good at catching tennis balls trying to catch balls thrown by the other volunteer. Mr. Butt coordinated the exercise by instructing the thrower and the catcher. Again, we could clearly see how the catcher's performance improved when he was instructed to focus on something else than the actual catching, letting "self 2" take care of the motorics of catching the balls while "self 1" was distracted with something else (trying to describe the trajectory and spin of the balls).

I have to say I was a bit tired but the session was good and thought-provoking.

Resistance as a Resource

I had only 45 minutes for the Resistance as a Resource workshop which was less than in Mechelen the previous week. A lot of people were also arriving late, which kind of ate up some time. Anyway, we did eventually get started with the workshop, five people each in four tables, and it worked out pretty well. The main drawback, based on the feedback I've received so far, was really the lack of time.

The last English-speaking session was canceled so me, Markus, Dave Nicolette, and Christian Schmidkonz from SAP headed downstairs to the bar. Others joined some 30 minutes later. Jurgen, Markus, Dave, Johannes Link, me, and Frank (plus others) mostly continued the discussion about Second Life we started in the Reeperbahn on Thursday.

As the evening progressed, me and Markus dropped our bags to the hotel and headed to St. Pauli to catch up with some of the conference delegates for a couple of beers. We didn't know where they had gone, though, and because we were having problems getting a call through to Frank, we ended up taking a nice walk around the St. Pauli area, following the locals and wondering why there are no football-oriented bars around even though Germany has Bundesliga and everything.

Finally we got through to Frank and heard that they were in a wine bar near the Sternschance station so we headed that way to say a quick "hi" before we had to go.

It was good that we didn't stay up too long because I had an early wake-up. I had planned a pretty tight schedule with my flight departing for London soon after 7am. The reason for such insanity was me wanting to attend the first international conference on postmodern programming in London on Saturday. In fact, I'll also write up some notes from the "PoMoPro" conference. Stay tuned...