Last weekend I drove up to Leipzig for the first .NET Open Space in Germany. It was great. I originally heard about the thing on the alt.net mailing list, and nearly decided not to go when I found out it was just a .net thing (without the alt). I am glad I did go. It wasn’t as technology or tool focussed as I thought, and the discussion oriented nature of the event helped ensure that.
On the first day I attended two fishbowls; a TDD one and a DDD one. I even jumped into a chair and rambled on about technical debt at one of them. In the afternoon I attended two presentations, “Presentation Zen” and “Getting Things Done”. The second day I attended another fishbowl about functional programming (it was supposed to be about F# but no one there actually knew much about F#). I was kind of surprised that not many people had much experience with functional programming. What do they teach at uni these days? It turned out I ended up doing a fair bit of talking at that one thanks to a LISP project I did one time. I hope I didn’t come across as a functional fanboy, I am actually more of an object bigot that has seen first hand that functional programming does have it’s uses. (I must admit it did inspire me to look into functional programming a bit more) I followed that session by attending a live demo of TDD and pair programming.
I had to leave at midday as I had a long drive ahead of me.
I didn’t leave empy handed though. The sponsors provided everyone with coffee cups, and a table was laid out with books and a few software packages that we could put named slips inside if we wanted to take them home. I put all five of my slips in the handful of English books that were there. I ended up getting a couple that no one else wanted: Behind Closed Doors and Ship It! They both look pretty interesting so I am pleased with that.
There are some flickr photos here, and other reports about it here.
Oh and it also inspired me to start blogging again. Lets see if it sticks.
