The first 10 minutes of this presentation were kind of rough. It was a little bad-geeky, and I thought it was going to one of those sessions where the presenter assumes the audience shares opinions that they don't have. Have you ever been in a situation like that?
Anyway, it turned around rapidly, and the last 60% was really good and informative. Too bad spec# seems so far away.
I felt that it would be a good idea to attend this, as my boss is hot on getting our team using TS with some kind of massive reporting/"agile"/addin thing that costs a lot of money. In case that last sentence wasn't obvious enough, let's just say that I treat the arrival of TS in my work life with great trepidation.
The presentation was good, but key pieces of data for me were:
- The models that Mario described seemed to have very little to do with Team System. You could do that for any set of tools.
- There was a lot of emphasis placed on the ability to handle/manage/deal-with what I would call "sub-optimal teams." Where I work now, I think is very similar to the environment Mario described: consultants in and out, ridiculously slow feedback loops with IT/infrastructure org, wide range of skillsets in teams. I think a lot of management where I work would totally buy what Mario sells. Seriously, he should call someone I don't know at my company, that decides these things. I would much rather work with someone like this than whoever they hired this week to (pretend to) do this kind of work. I just think that this is the wrong direction to attack this problem from. Inevitably, it's the direction we will probably take.
- It's good to know there is a 496-pager about how to do team development with TFS.
- It would be a good career move to learn this stuff.
- If my current future career path involves this stuff, I think it's time for me to investigate pig farming, because this is not my beautiful house.
The whole "tools that generate reports and stuff are for managers" from the Agile Q&A session speaks more to me. I am more interested in getting closer to the business problem domain than wallowing in _our_ problem domain. I only want tools that help me _do_ work, not tools that help me do more work.
There were a lot of people I heard at this conference that seemed to come from Edmonton. Edmug. These guys had it going on. They were like a gang or something. I think it's cool when a bunch of people who share a common interest get so enthusiastic about it. I think James is kind of like a thought leader there or something. He seemed really smart and made me want to move to Edmonton. I wonder if I could get a work permit. Do they let illegal aliens work in Canada?
Somehow, I was actually a little surprised to see James presenting on this topic. It wasn't really an agile thing, or some cool web 2.0 thing, or an "ALT" thing, or anything like that. It was just straight up good architectural/technology advice.
One of my notes was that this is a good talk for all ages crowds - developer's of any level could benefit from a talk like this. What I liked most was that he was basically telling people to think, and not just dispensing "best practices."
James has a weblog. Subscribed.
If I had to pick one, this might be my favorite session. This one or Jeremy's winforms one. It wasn't so much that I got a lot of new information here - preaching to the choir again - but it's really useful to talk about this stuff with other people doing it. That's what I was hoping to do with my book club idea earlier this year, but that never took off. First they laughed and compared me to Oprah for wanting to do a book club. Then the QA guys and my boss stole the idea and tried to do it themselves. Sniff...sniff...
So since no one else at my work (except Michael) want to talk about DDD, it was really nice to be in this talk, and also the impromptu discussion we had in the hall, with Oren, John Vanspronssen, and another guy that works with John at MDA. I wish we could have like 4 hours of that kind of stuff. Like a birds of feather or something.
There was a fire alarm towards the end of the session, just when things were getting really interesting and we had the basics out of the way.
I can't really do justice to this talk here. I will probably be posting more about some thoughts I had later.
One funny thought I had, though: John called David out on the idea of the "world model" and how DDD isn't a world model but a _domain_ model. Slip of the tongue in a world...oops...a domain of overloaded terms. But when David mentioned building systems of interconnected domain models, I immediately thought of this Royksopp video, which shows many domain models interacting.
More later...
There were 2 more sessions I attended, but I have to go to work, and I want to post this now so it doesn't become another neglected post in my drafts folder.