CITCON London 2006 Write Up

By Mike Cannon-Brookes|Uncategorized|4 Comments

Friday and Saturday I had a great time at “CITCON London”:http://www.citconf.com (note – before I turned up I presumed it was pronounced ‘sit-con’ – like citrus – but apparently it’s ‘kit-con’).
It was my second experience of an “OpenSpaces” conference after “RCC”:http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/archives/000568.html in Portland, and I must say I really like the format. As long as there’s a small number of dedicated people, it works brilliantly. As another participant said in the wrap up session, you really feel like you’re _participating_ in the conference rather than just being _talked at_ by some spruik with a PowerPoint deck.
I won’t write up detailed session notes here (you can find those “online”:http://www.citconf.com/wiki/index.php/London%202006%20Session%20Notes) but throughout the conference I wrote down small choice quotes and tidbits from the sessions I attended.
h2. Learnings
* On the integration of code, “XP is all about pain. The idea is if something is painful, do it often enough that it’s not painful anymore”
* Cyclomatic complexity actually _can_ be useful as a simple red flag indicator for classes you should examine – ie look at the top 5%, if they’re major outliers rewrite them.
* Jeff recommended a book: “No Excuses Management”:http://www.amazon.com/No-Excuses-Management-Starting-Growing-Surviving/dp/0385426046/sr=1-1/qid=1160490707/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8469357-7572956?ie=UTF8&s=books the story of Cypress Semiconductor
* “JDepend”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fclarkware.com%2Fsoftware%2FJDepend.html&ei=Ba8rRZW9O7y4aqaGwJIC&sig=__3uzD5e_1KHmyf-HlnVnabY2WKnU=&sig2=FYm52jKN4FHvYtc1t-iLig and “JayWalker”:http://jaywalker.codehaus.org/ were both dependency analysis tools people raved about.
* One of the ThoughtWorkers recommended “Key Promoter”:http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=1003 an IDEA plugin that displays the shortcut key combination for any command you execute using the mouse in big text ( useful for pairing and learning keyboard shortcuts).
* Jeff mentioned the karate concept of “su-ha-re” in relation to the understanding of learning XP, but I can’t seem to find any Google links on it. Help needed!
* Virginia Satir’s work on why people stay in abusive relationships too long was related to why people don’t change bad teams in a work environment. Amused me I love crazy parallels.
* I think the “Extreme Hour”:http://xp.c2.com/ExtremeHour.html is something we should do at work to improve team’s XP skills.
* Another book recommendation (not sure who from – sorry!) was Michael Cusumano’s “The Business of Software”:http://www.amazon.com/Business-Software-Manager-Programmer-Entrepreneur/dp/074321580X
For all the sessions titles, you can also see the full session board online:

Beyond that, I managed to get a few “good”:http://www.willemvandenende.com/photos/?Qwd=./2006/citcon&Qif=img_0564.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=S “JIRA”:http://www.willemvandenende.com/photos/?Qwd=./2006/citcon&Qif=img_0563.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=S “plugs”:http://www.willemvandenende.com/photos/?Qwd=./2006/citcon&Qif=img_0579.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=S in using only a t-shirt, I look like I put “Jeff to sleep”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/87709569@N00/264279678/in/set-72157594318666513/ at the end of my build telemetry session and if you look through the photos carefully enough you just might get a few “Bamboo”:http://ericlefevre.net/pictures/06_07_citcon/subalbum_1_slideshow.html?photo=8 “teaser”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/87709569@N00/264279671/in/set-72157594318666513/ screenies
A great conference overall – well done to Jeff and Paul – fantastically organised and I look forward to the next one, in _Sydney_ in February!