November 18th, 2009
The names of the ACCU 2010 conference (14-17 April 2010, Oxford, UK) keynote speakers are now public
- Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum
- James Bach, well-known software tester
- Dan North, Agile coach, programmer, and inventor of Behaviour Driven Development
- Russel Winder, author, trainer, and expert in parallel and distributed programming
As usual, the conference will feature some pre-conference tutorials:
- A Certified Scrum Master course by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield (the Monday and Tuesday before the conference)
- An introduction to the D programming language by Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu
- A course on software testing by James Bach
There is also a twitter account you can follow for updates: @accu2010.
The full programme will be announced shortly. It promises to be as exciting as ever–being the conference chair I know that for sure 
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November 8th, 2009
The London XPDay is one of the oldest, and, in my very biased opinion, one of the very best international conferences on agile software development.
This year’s programme includes some great sessions. However, I think some very interesting ones will materialise in the open-space sessions (which make bulk of the programme) for which all the delegates will be able to propose the topics that interest them most and, if there is enough interest from other attendees, lead a session.
All the previous editions have been very successful, and most people always left with some new insights.
There are still some places available. Hurry up and book yours here—it is exceptionally good value for money.
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September 13th, 2009
Some time ago Kevlin Henney and O’Reilly started a new book project in the “97 things” series: the “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”. This is still work in progress, and, if you have some interesting tips you wish to share with other programmers, you can become a contributor as well. Just go to the site and follow the instructions. The list of contributors includes, among the others, several well known people in our field.
I’ve contributed three entries which can be found in the “edited contributions” section
If you read (any of) them, I would really appreciate your feedback.
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June 29th, 2009
Submissions are now open for programmed sessions at XpDay London 2009, to be held 7th and 8th December 2009. http://www.xpday.org/
You are invited to propose a session for the first day of the conference. We are particularly interested in the following
- Experience reports—share your stories of challenge and success with Agile and Lean techniques. Experience reports will be intensively shepherded by experienced practitioners.
- Hands-on technical sessions—share techniques and practices in practical sessions: workshops, tutorials, simulations
- Practitioners’ advances in the art—share the techniques of expert Agile and Lean practitioners, work with them to move the craft forward.
The second day of the conference will be an OpenSpace session with topics selected at the end of the first day. Programmed sessions are most suitable for topics requiring some set up or extensive preparation.
To submit a session, please go to http://xpday-london.editme.com/XpDay2009Submissions
Submissions will be accepted until Friday 14th August.
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May 5th, 2009
The conference is over, and I needed the last week to recover from it—being the conference chair is always very rewarding but also quite exhausting, even when the conference goes smoothly (and, perhaps, staying up until late drinking beers while enjoying quite a few chats with the various delegates and speakers had an impact on that as well).
Given the current economic climate, the attendance was incredible. There were around 350 people; that was almost as many as in 2008 (the difference was about 10 people less in 2009). And this at a time when several conferences lost a big chunk of their size an others closed down completely. In fact, several delegates told me that this time they were paying for the conference out of their own pockets, but the programme looked so good that they couldn’t possibly miss it!
The conference started (as I hoped) with a bit of controversy caused by a keynote from Robert Martin (Uncle Bob) entitled “The Birth Of Software Craftsmanship” followed by an end of day keynote on the same day by Nicolai Josuttis entitled “Welcome Crappy CodeThe Death of Code Quality”. The slides will be online on the conference website soon. In the meantime you can read the blog entry written by Bob Martin about it here.
On a non-software related note, I was quite proud of the fact that the keynote from Baroness Susan Greenfield entitled “Geeks, Nerds and Other Prejudices”—in which she debunked some myths on gender differences—was received with an huge ovation (we had to ask people to stop applauding because we were running late!) proving that, despite of being a mostly male audience, was, by no means, a chauvinistic one.
Being the conference chair, I’ll keep my preferences to myself. However, you can have a look at what other people have already written about it (I expect more to be published):
Finally, I co-presented a workshop with Kevlin Henney and Peter Sommerlad on “Patterns of Simplicity” whose results (not all of them just yet, we are working on it) can be found in the SimpleCode wiki . Kevlin, Peter and I, in the last few years, have been running sessions on simple code alone and together. Hopefully, we’ll make an impact, since I’m quite tired of working on fixing unnecessarily complicated code bases.
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March 18th, 2009
The ACCU 2009 conference www.accu.org/conference will start in about one month. The 21 of April is pre-conference tutorials day with:
- Linda Rising “Fearless Change: Patterns For Introducing New Ideas”
- Alisdair Meredith “Up And Running With C++0X”
- Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce “Growing Object Oriented Software , Guided By Tests”
Then the 22 of April will be the first day of the main conference with Keynotes from Robert Martin (uncle Bob) and Nico Josuttis.
The conference is a great one, and incredible value for money. I strongly recommend it (disclaimer: I’m the conference chair ;-)), but you don’t have to take my word for it; have a look at the programme at http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2009/accu2009_schedule and decide for yourself
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