The day is over. The bar is still going strong, but too much smoke for me… and I’ve been in enough sessions on the day after a night of partying at a conference and I just dont have it in me anymore (Getting old I guess). So I ordered one last cold one to go and decided to write a few lines in the blog about today’s sessions.
All in all it was a good day. I attended 5 sessions and had some great conversations in between. There was only one session I wish I would have opted out of. It wasn’t really bad, but it wasn’t really about the kind of thing I was looking for. In the interest of not griping, I’ll keep that one to myself.
I attended 3 sessions by Neal Ford, the Meme Wrangler (‘Real World Agile’, ‘Pragmatic XP’, and ‘Test Driven Design’). I have to be honest… I have listened to several podcasts in which he was a participant, watched a video or two that he was in, and read many of his blog posts. I liked them all and had high expectations. He delivered. As I’ve said in previous blog posts, I’m not easily enamored with ‘experts’. But he gets his ideas across in a very clear and concise way. He’s doesn’t come across as preaching and he lays out his arguments very well. I would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone who wants to learn about topics like SD agility, dynamic languages, and his ‘polyglot’ programmer topics.
I was also very interested in the ‘Real World Test Driven Design’ session by Scott Davis.
It was a good session, but unfortunately for my rating of it, I had just attended Neal Ford’s ‘Test Driven Design’ session. It’s not that Scott Davis’s session was bad at all… it was just a lot of the same info. I would have no problem recommending it to anyone.
I got a lot of good info from all of the sessions today. I’m already sold on the NFJS conferences. There is something awesome about not having corporate sponsorship at a dev conference. No vendors trying to shove a product down your throat hidden in a free T-shirt, no sessions that end up being a 45 minute sales pitch. Its a great concept.
I plan on more blogging on the sessions, but I’m not going to spew the notes on them. Most of the speakers have the session slides publicly available on their websites so I’ll just link to them.
Until tomorrow….
mikewitters.com 
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