Earlier this week I had the pleasure to attend and draw at Swansea con. This was my first software craftsmanship conference and a real eye opener for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The event was well run and organised at the Liberty stadium, an impressive venue. Only more impressive was the organiser Viv Richards  whos enthusiasm and a hardwork drags all these great people to Swansea con. Bravo Viv

Craftsmen

Meeting the craftsmen and seeing there passion for software development and on occasion dislike of the dogma around agile was great. There was definitely a diversity of idea.

Sander Hoogendoorn finished the conference off with a energetic performance and got it spot on with his observations that the original waterfall model in 1970 had arrows going the other way. Kind of similar to agile! We could have saved a lot of time if people had made it to figure 2. The manifesto itself is a manifesto for Software Develolment not for agile and we should not lose focus that we are here to deliver better software faster and that was the original goal of the agile movement.

Simon Brown kicked the conference off talking about the challenges of agile and architecture. Simon talked about two common failure modes, big upfront design and no design. Instead we need to look back to the agile manifesto and principle 9, Continuous attention to technical design. Maybe you could boil that down to continuous technical leadership?

There were many more interesting talks craftsmen vs lean, education for engineers, teal organisations to mention a few. Very different challenges were discussed and debated.

The Drawing

I was was working with Neuland art markers and stokmar wax crayons and blocks. These worked great. I really enjoyed placing all the talks onto a large wall and had around 15 talks recorded over the two days. The area provided a focal point for people to gather and discuss. Pic of half way through the second day:

I will upload the rest of the photos soon, but they can be found on my Twitter feed  As Arnold Schwarzenegger said “I’ll be back” hopefully if Swansea will have me again.