27 November 2013

CodeCopTour Week 11

In the eleventh week of my Software Craftsmanship tour I visited the Austrian Lotteries gaming enterprise. I paired with Felix Kammerer and Stanka Gasic from the development team only one day each. In these days I learned that I am a keyboard hugger ;-) Usually I am dominating my pair. The situation is better if there is no second keyboard because it takes more energy to take it away actively from my pair than to just start typing on my own one. Maybe I will continue my tour without an extra keyboard from now on...

What a crowd at DevoxxDevoxx 2013
The manager of the Lotteries' development department had invited me for a longer visit, and I had planned my tour accordingly, but I had to change my plans on short notice. In a last-minute lottery the Vienna Scala User Group gave away a ticket for this year's Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium. I have been to Devoxx before and it really is a great conference. I had not planned for it because I knew that I would be busy with my tour, but obviously I was supposed to go there after all. Luckily my JUG voucher was still valid after the conference had been sold out, which usually happens quite early. On my return I gave a short presentation at the Scala Vienna meetup about my impressions of Devoxx 2013. The short summary is that Devoxx is a great conference and you need to go there, at least once. I probably should write a long summary as well, as I did three years ago, but I rather continue with the findings from my current CodeCopTour. So if you want to know more about Devoxx 2013, please refer to posts other attendees have written, e.g. Bartosz Majsak, Peter Pilgrim or Steve Schols.

Conferences as part of a Journeyman Tour
My friend Manuel talking about Play FrameworkThis brings me to the topic of conferences. Conferences and other community related activities like Coding Dojos or Code Retreats are the perfect addition to a teaching and learning tour. For example Daniel Temme, who did a similar tour earlier this year, actually started his tour during the German SoCraTes conference and visited ALE conference in the middle of his tour. When you plan for a Journeyman tour, adding space for conferences and other technology related meet-ups is easy. Additional to learning something new, conferences provide you with opportunities to discuss your findings with other craftsmen and maybe even find new hosts for your continued tour. As you have no income commercial conferences are out of the question, unless you present something, like I did during Agile Testing Days.

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