CITCON London 2011

Given what a great conference CITCON 2010 was, when registration opened for CITCON 2011, I didn't hesitate - which turned out to be a good thing, since spots had filled up rather quick. So next year, watch the mailing list, and rush to the registration form!

Friday Evening - Open Spaces Introduction/Topic Proposals

It was held at Skillsmatter, so I assumed there will be no surprises for me there (great infrastructure), but since I didn't have to take the tube this time (picked my accommodation to be walking distance from Glasswell Road on purpose), I've quickly learned that Bing Maps has little to no knowledge of Glasswell Road and Skillsmatter. So the first day I took a nice, leisurely, albeit somewhat longer road towards the location.

The registration went flawlessly, ran by PJ's mom. Great job!

PJ and Jeffery made the introductions in their usual, entertaining manner. While it wasn't new for me, I was glad to see this time they emphasized that the schedule can change throughout the day - apparently it wasn't only me who had been surprised by it last year. And of course the schedule did change.

Because Julian Simpson couldn't make it, I introduced his topic (Do you use your tests in prod?), and then two of my own - Continuous Release and Delivery in Downloadable Product Companies and Why Most People Don't have a Rollback Plan for Releases and instead "plan" to Hack Forward.

The great thing about proposing topics is that even when it doesn't meet the threshold to have a whole session dedicated to it, a lot of people now know that you are interested in this topic, and find you to share their experiences about it during the breaks.

To my surprise, we actually followed Jeffery's recommendation and we didn't run side conversations during the proposals, so the process was smooth and efficient, and there was more than enough time to chat later - especially that I didn't worry much about the agenda, since proposing two topics made my priorities to attend those, and I knew that whatever agenda we'll have at Friday closing time is not final.

As we learned the next day, when you propose a topic, you should be careful which words to use. In my case, rollback was a terrible word, since many interpreted as going back in time, undoing, while what I meant was more like backout (planned and disciplined retreat).

Sessions I attended

I've added my notes on the conference wiki:

• Feature Branching, Feature toggles, What Makes a Build a Release


• Releases without things going wrong + why few make backout plans


• Do you use your tests in prod


• Organizational Anthropology

Sessions I wish I attended

• BitbeamBot: The Angry Birds Playing, Mobile Testing Robot by Jason Huggins ran a session about automated UI testing of touch screens


• there was a TDD session - given that often I need (want) to explain TDD to people new to the concept, it would have been a great learning opportunity seeing someone (was it run by Steve Freeman?) else's approach to introducing it. Plus likely I would have gained a new understanding of TDD...


• Backyard beekeeping - I ended up in a random chat, but I was would have been curious to see these non-technical, non-work related sessions


• I couldn't stay long enough in the Slaughtered Lamb

The hallway chats

While open spaces are already like an unconference, nonetheless a lot of great conversations took place during the breaks (didn't get to use the law of two feet this time either), and I've met a lot of great people. I just wish I had more time to talk more with each of them. Guess I queued these conversations for future processing on twitter or via email.

In contrast to last year's conference, I spent almost the whole time offline, in the analog world, and it didn't feel the least bit wrong. I've pretty much only used twitter when I followed someone on twitter - instead of exchanging emails or business card. Though I have to admit, business cards are great for jotting down small reminder notes on them.

Some travel lessons I've learned

While this is tangential to CITCON, I have learnt a few lessons on this trip. I'll list them here, hoping it's beneficial for others.

• have your travel plans printed out (a'la TripIt. It made the check-in process much smoother, and going from the airport to my hotel was perfectly relaxed, knowing exactly which tube to take. The only part I forgot to plan was from the Nueremberg Airport to the office (only remembered that would be useful when I landed). Thanks to Career Tools for the idea (and they great advice for attending conferences, approaching your boss about sending you to a conference, and more)!


• Phones, data plans, roaming. While this isn't the reason that I always buy my phones from the stores and not from the carriers, being able to just buy a prepaid SIM in London made a huge difference. It's not necessarily the money, though I think I've saved there (for the four days I stayed, just the data plan would have cost me 14 €, and there are the calls I made - contrast that with the £15), but rather that making a call or using mobile net wasn't something that I had to consciously choose (is it worth the extra roaming charge?).


• have enough slack in your trip. I arrived Friday afternoon, and returned home on Monday morning. This allowed me to dedicate Friday and Saturday to the conference (and the Slaughtered Lamb afterwards), be able to meet up with friends living in London on Sunday, and the fact that some of my friends were an hour late just simply didn't cause a problem. And financially it doesn't have to be more expensive - I believe I spent about the same amount on the three nights' stay as I did last year for two nights. Advance planning, more research for accommodation helps you with that.


• If you need travel accessories (e.g.: AC adapter for the UK), try them before leaving home - I managed to buy adapters incompatible with my laptop's charger. Luckily the reception at my hotel managed to find one of theirs that was compatible, but it took a long five minutes for them to find one, so I wouldn't rely on this


• In addition to that, I forgot my phone charger at home, and while Bing Maps isn't perfect, it's much better than walking in London without a GPS. Lesson learned: it's handy when you have a USB cable with you that you can use to charge from somebody's laptop - the 10 cm long USB cable fits in any pocket.

My #citcon London 2010 experience

This was both my first citcon (apparently pronounced "kitcon") and open space conference I've attended, and I'm sure it hasn't been the last for either one!

The venue was the Skillsmatter Exchange, which was simple in appearance (guess it's a former warehouse of sort), but with enough space, flipcharts, tables, projectors, seats needed for this event. There was enough space to chat without disturbing sessions, or to just grab a coffee - which seemed to be sufficient for this conference (and for my needs/expectations).

Friday evening was dedicated for introductions and for session proposals, topic merging, voting, and of course, some beer. It was a nice reminder that my problems are not unique - I've actually stepped out from the proposals line given that a number people already suggested topics that covered my problem. Maybe it was more to do with the fact that I'm still not comfortable speaking in front of big audiences (more than 20-30 people make me nervous. Guess I'll just have to practice, given that there was a time when any public speaking used to scare me.).

Saturday morning the schedule was supposedly finalized by the end of the breakfest provided. Later on it turned out not to be the case, so I've missed a couple of sessions, though all I've attended were great. Having a problem to choose from many good sessions is much better than not having any good ones to chose from. Nonetheless, I'll keep this in mind for future open spaces not to take anything granted unitl you are in the session.

The first session was about database testing, versioning, and deployment. This is a topic close and dear to my heart, and it was interesting to realize the bounderies of the boxes I've been thinking in - e.g.: I've not been working in multiversion deployment scenarios, where you need to go from any version to the current. I've also learned to be more explicit in my communication, e.g.: when I asked about a tool like agitar's for databases to generate characteristic tests for regression, just because a few people nodded that might be useful, I've assumed everyone knows what I'm talking about, which led to a misunderstanding between me and Gojko Adzic about testing with "random data". Though we've clarified this after the session, I'm wondering why it happened that I couldn't explain it during the session.

Before lunch, I've attended the module dependency handling session, where I learned there is no tool yet for handling versioned dependencies (i.e.: I would want to know if the version/feature branches of a given project are compatible with all versions of dependant projects). The discussion was nice, but I've had some trouble following once things got Java specific.

Next up was the Overcoming Organisational Defensiveness session. I thought I knew a lot about this topic, and was pleasantly surprised by all the new aspects that I learned, including, but not limited to:

• Don't fix your problem, fix their problem
• while not everyone agrees, in certain contexts, un-branding a practice helps (e.g.: we referenced Dan North's example from another conference of not doing pair programming, but asking two people to look into a problem together)
• when developers don't have time to improve, bringing in a coach doesn't solve the problem. You first need to dedicate time for them to learn.
• instead of trying to change people, step back and see if you can create some change that would effect them in ways you would like, but doesn't require their prior approval/cooperation and you can do it yourself
• don't just do 5 whys, do the 5 "so what?" too

The next session's title was Using KPIs/Getting a data-driven organization, however, the topic shifted to organization culture and psychology. Not suprisingly, we didn't find a silver bullet, but there were a number of good laughs and ideas (transparency, exposure, accountability, responsibility, over and undercontroling, ownership were the main themes). It was a smaller session, but in my experience that made it much more focused and interactive; contrasted with the bigger sessions. Plus I have been surprised, there are people using vim on the mac :)

The final session was Beyond Basic TDD, where the essence boils down to TDD having a marketing message that design will just evolve, despite Kent Beck admitting that might not always be the case (i.e.: if you've got people with good design sense, no methodology will prevent them from writing well designed code). There should be more focus on teaching programmers about design. Gojko took over from there to facilitate the discussion around what can be done to bring those familiar with TDD basics to the next level, I have to admit I've become quite exhausted by this session, something to keep in mind next time when organizing sessions around a whiteboard.

Overall, it was great fun, it was good to bounce ideas off from people, chat with random ones, and to talk with people known only from twitter. The one thing I regret is that I had to skip the after event pubbing (first evening I was just way too tired, while Saturday evening I was catching up with some friends living in London). Next time I'll try to allocate one more day for the trip, because the hallway conversations were great during the event, and I would be surprised if they were any worse in the pub.