skillsmatter, london: day 3
man, again a hour too early. but needed to pack my stuff so i arrived at the old sessions house on time. first session with david laribee: “towards a new architect”.
man is dave a good speaker. nice minimalistic slides. and we got teamwork. i think a great exercise was the condensation of team values. we startet in small groups (5 people) – diversion phase. where we found around 25 values. all the stuff that came to our minds. then we voted on the values and found 5 top values (conversion phase, we could have summed al the teams values up but to see how it works it was enough) for which we had to find sentences to declare why we honour that value. dave suggested to print those team values so the team have them in mind always. great idea.
after the usual lunchbox i decided to attend the second workshop from dave. unfortunately it started a bit messy. not everybody understood what to do because the exercises where really abstract. and because i had to depart about an hour too early i couldnt see the end result.
as i mentioned my flight was early so i had to leave skillsmatter at 17 o’clock. too bad because they instantiated a discussion with all the speakers at 18 o’clock and a beer at the crown pub nearby after that. i should have planned my home ride on thursday. hmmm…next time.
baseline:
i think the progressive .net workshops from skillsmatter where great. i had very good conversations (mostly limited by my speaking skills). the speakers where always near. not that they leaved after their talk but one could always get to them and ask questions. the atmosphere was very familiar. i liked the location and the organisation was very good. two things i didnt like: the internet-connection was very bad. that was really really annoying. many attendees had 3g-connections but i think if i had used mine (german provider!!) i think by boss had killed me. the second thing: the lunch boxes where a little small for my taste. but i can recommend the workshops without a doubt.
Michel on May 15th, 2009
What’s wrong with your speaking skills? The panel wasn’t that great. I won a book though, which I promptly gave away
The beer drinking afterward was a blast though.