KaizenConf Wrap
I know this is a little late and somewhat out of order but I really feel compelled to write a public thank you note to all of the facilitators and attendees at the pre-conference workshops and the KaizenConf open spaces conference. I have made a boat load of new friends in the ALT.Net community that I know will be long lasting and very fruitful. The 4 day conference was by far the best conference I have ever been to. I came with so many questions got some answers and left with even more questions. It was very humbling to be surrounded by a lot of smart people, at the same time it is also very encouraging because these people are all very nice, friendly and real.
Workshops
The workshops that were put on were outstanding. I personally attended the Advanced NHibernate talk which was very helpful, you can see my notes here. I also went to the DDD Chalk Talk on Thursday afternoon, this was a very good talk about different aspects of Domain Driven Development. Friday started off with Jeremy and Chad’s Opinionated ASP.Net session and followed up with Dave’s Pull Don’t Push - Lean Systems and KanBan. All of these sessions were great. I have linked to what information is available now, and will link more as I find it.
Open Spaces
Friday night we “Opened” the space and one of the topics I suggested is Lean software engineering / KanBan with a small team. I didn’t know if anybody would vote for my topic or not but low and behold they did. So at my first open spaces event, I was also the convener of a space. This was a little bit intimidating at first but I handled it very similar to the way I do my college classes, we just all talked. Special thanks to Dave Laribee, Chad Myers, Chris Bilson and others that I don’t know your names, for being so involved and speaking during this session.
I spent time in some other very good sessions such as KanBan Applications, and Concurrent Set Based Software Engineering. There were so many good topics that I can’t even remember what all they were, but there is a full list on the wiki.
As an action item on Sunday with KanBan in Small Teams I committed to documenting my teams implementation of the Lean Methodology with a KanBan task board.
In conclusion, Thank You again to all the great people in the Alt.Net community that came together in Austin to make this a very memorable event.
Great to meet you. It was awesome to have the perspective of some of the people who work at _already lean_ organizations, such as you, Ray, and Kirstin. That was one of the coolest things about the conference for me.
I’m looking forward to following your journey on the lean path.