I’m keeping this brief since I don’t have time to write more and want to keep a track of significant things came up today.

• Pekka Himanen presented the keynote, The Hacker Ethic discussing environmental issues and attitudes that make up, not what I interpret as just a hacker, but someone who is passionate about their work and the things that can help sustain or maintain their energy levels. Things like building up a sense of community and trust certainly help.
• I was a little disappointed with Agile Development with Domain Specific Languages, in that it was fairly tool centric – with MS DSL tools for Visual Studio and Metacase. We had some post discussion had about whether or not a meta model was actually needed for a domain specific language (i.e. do you need to validate the language the user is using, or just trust that they are doing the right thing).
• Open space sessions – I think trialled for the first time in the European series of XP conferences, were extremely popular with well over fifteen dynamic sessions planned. I actually just got back from attending one scheduled for 10pm back in the hotel, throwing about DSLs vs FIT and which one was better.
• My presentation on building Agile GUIs went quite well – got some great feedback and helped some other developers writing client side applications to validate or assert the things they were doing.

I got some great feedback in that, yes, the acceptance tests I used as an example could be written in a script-friendly manner (with a few new tools such as JUseCase and Exactor), but there was nothing that would stop me from refactoring to FIT or any of these other frameworks. The focus of my presentation was not focused on how you write acceptance tests (since people like FIT have already addressed this), but rather how you go about building up the different components, and Acceptance Tests spawning additional unit and unit integration tests to get the Acceptance Test passing. It looks completely different from any normal Swing code you would ever see tutorials for.

• Great meeting with lots of people in the industry and lots of people you have read, but were great meeting. The workshop with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the weekend was great, but now I’ve also met heaps of other interesting people such as Charlie Poole, JB Rainsberger, Mike Hill, Mike Feathers, Erik Lundh, David Hussman, and Jutta Eckstein just to name a few.
• The final keynote of the day was interesting about how, five or six years down the track, how successful has the agile movement been and where do we go from here. It was presented by Sean Hanly, who works for the main sponsor of this year’s conference and I think he put it together fairly well. Paraphrasing him, how do we keep the heart and principles behind agile as it continues to be used and ‘abused’ so that it doesn’t end up on the same process graveyard many other processes have been.

Whoops, I said I’d keep it short, but oh well…