I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!
Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.
First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.
The overnight flight was not nearly as sleepy as I would have liked. Older planes apparently don't cool off much during flight, which is bad for me, as I really prefer to sleep in a cold room with lots of blankets. I also prefer to sleep lying down, which, as any of you who've experienced transatlantic travel in coach know, is basically impossible in a 747.
Anyway, what that all amounted to was me getting in at about 9:30 and wishing I could have slept. Thankfully I was able to adjust fairly quickly to the new schedule, and things were aces from there.
It was interesting to meet in real life so many of the people with whom I had interacted via IRC and forums. A lot of them were really cool people, which was great since I had come as the sole representative of EchoDitto and didn't exactly have any guarantee of social interaction. About two days into the conference I met up with ExoDitto Justin Miller, who was there with a group of people from the DoD. They're doing some really cool open-source stuff which I'm not sure I can talk about here, but needless to say the move towards open-source is one which I think would benefit a number of existing government agencies.
The days were PACKED and to my chagrin a number of talks I wanted to attend were scheduled for the same timeslot, but someone had the brilliant idea of recording most of the sessions and posting them online, and I'd definitely recommend checking them out.
It wouldn't be feasible for me to talk in depth about every session I attended, so instead I'll just focus on the one that interested me the most: the Agile Development method.
Why did this one strike me? Well, for the most part there weren't many technical surprises at DC07, with maybe the exception of Dave Cohen's presentation on Drupal for Facebook, which shows some real promise for melding the two platforms. One of the reasons I was sent out to Barcelona was for self-improvement, and as many developers out there know, getting a great development process going is one area where many people find themselves stuck. The Agile process, to me, represents a great solution - one that will almost certainly keep the client happy and the developer sane, and that combination leads to faster development, less overhead, and more client leads.
Here's the general idea behind Agile software development:
- Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
- Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
- Working software is the principal measure of progress
- Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
- Close, daily, cooperation between business people and developers
- Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
- Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
- Simplicity
- Self-organizing teams
- Regular adaptation to changing circumstances
EchoDitto's development process is already composed of some of these ideas, but lately we've been starting to take a look at adopting a majority of them.
All in all, DC07 was an incredibly beneficial experience, reinforcing things I already knew and teaching me things I didn't. I'm not entirely sure where the next DrupalCon will be held (some are saying Stuttgart), but if you get the chance - GO!
