Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Reflections from SD West 2008
bySD West, one of the nation’s premier software development conventions, just concluded SD West 2008. Yours truly was fortunate enough to be able to attend, and for an entire fun filled week I got to embrace my inner geek and participate in tutorials on Agile Estimating and Planning, attend classes on Test Driven Development, and visit expo booths to play Guitar Hero (Hey - we may be developers, but we’re aren’t total nerds!). I even managed to go on a Segway Tour of San Francisco. OK, that last one was a little nerdy, but still pretty fun!
Agile was among the many topics being covered at this year’s SD West. IBM was promoting it heavily, and IMHO the best keynote speech of the conference was given by Scott Ambler on the first day. In fact, it was so good that I will be blogging about that separately (I gotta keep people coming back somehow, right?). One thing that I really enjoyed taking away from the numerous Agile tracks that I went to was the fact that Sundog “gets it” when it comes to Agile. We have definately moved past the adoption phase, and are right on pace with the industry leaders in terms of perfecting our application of it in software development.
I also had a chance to attend a expo session on Second Life. Second Life is a virtual 3D world that can be used for conferences, meetings, marketing, etc. Think World of Warcraft meets the business world. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should; the idea behind it could very well revolutionize the way we approach online communities, maybe even the world wide web. Approach with a little bit of skepticism though - the live demo kept crashing, reminiscent of Bill Gates’ Windows 98 Comdex demo.
All in all it was a great conference and one that I definately advocate all serious players in the software development industry should make an attempt to go to. See you next year at SD West 2009!
