Upcoming events

4 mins
, , , , , ,

So it’s that time of year again. I’ve got a number of conferences and workshops coming up, ranging over all sorts of topics. I just popped over to Martin Fowler’s site (I’m doing a talk with him this week) and noticed that he has a much more organised setup than me. All his events are in a sidebar and there is a handy link if you want more details. Another idea to go on my to-do pile.

ThoughtWorks Quarterly Technology Briefing

  • Manchester - 12 September 2007
  • London - 20 September 2007

This is the second instalment in ThoughtWorks series of informal sessions aimed at technologists across the spectrum. Although calling it a technology briefing is a bit inaccurate because the title for this one is “How to Sell Agile to your Organisation”, which has far more to do with the themes of people, risk and change than with anything technological.

This is the talk I’ll be presenting with Martin so I can guarantee a lively session. In his own words: “As I detest selling anything to anyone it will be interesting to see how this talk works out.”

Details and registration info are on the ThoughtWorks website.

RailsConf Europe

  • Berlin - 17-19 September 2007

A lot of Ruby folk seem to have taken to behaviour-driven development. This is almost entirely due to the success of the rspec project, which is in turn due to the enthusiasm and dedication of its developers and the community they have established.

A while back I wrote a story-level BDD framework for Ruby called rbehave which has since been integrated into the rspec project.

I’ll be helping rspec project leads David Chelimsky and Aslak Hellesoy present a workshop entitled A half-day of behaviour-driven development on Rails, where we’ll be demonstrating how rspec helps you write software that is focused on achieving an outcome. It’s at 8:30am on the Monday morning, so make sure you’re there first thing.

Expo-C Roadshow

  • Växjö - 15-16 October 2007
  • Karlskrona - 17-18 October 2007

Expo-C is one of my favourite events. It’s a small conference in south-east Sweden and it seems to attract an audience that really cares about what they are doing. I’ve done two of them now, on very different topics, and on both occasions I was very impressed with the quality of the attendees and the calibre of the other speakers. (I’m usually the only one there who hasn’t written a book.)

This time they are doing two mini-conferences back to back, in Växjö and then Karlskrona, with a tutorial day and a seminar day (six sessions) in each location. I’ll be running full-day tutorials on BDD in Växjö, and Coaching, Communication and Change in Karlskrona. For the seminar I’ll be talking about bridging the communication gap, based on a keynote I gave with Martin Fowler at QCon earlier this year.

I will also be learning how to pronounce “Växjö”.

OOPSLA

  • Montreal - 21-25 October 2007

This will be my first OOPSLA. I’ve heard a lot about it and I’m a bit intimidated. By reputation it seems a bit more “cerebral” than most conferences. It will also be the first time I’ve ever presented JBehave at a conference. No mean feat considering I started writing it at the end of 2003! There’s perpetual beta for you.

My co-presenter is my ThoughtWorks colleague, friend and cybergoth Liz Keogh, the person responsible for getting JBehave to 1.0. I have huge respect for Liz; she manages to combine software with poetry. This isn’t a pretentious metaphor - she actually does combine software with poetry. She ran a haiku workshop at a previous ThoughtWorks away day that many of the attendees nominated as the highlight of their day. She also writes inspiring and inspired blog articles.

I’m only going because I want to see what Liz does when she’s let loose on a roomful of developers. I reckon we’ll end up writing haiku acceptance criteria.

And some others…

There are another couple of events in the pipeline that I will blog about nearer the time (January and February next year). After that I’m going to have a bit of a lie down.

Correction: I got the dates wrong for OOPSLA. Thanks Joshua Graham for putting me straight. Another correction: My Swedish geography is appalling. Thanks Morgan Persson.