Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

XP Days Ukraine 2011

Photos from conference are made by Andrii Matukhno

XP Days is a 3 days event. First 2 days are dedicated for trainings and meet-ups and the last day was for speeches. This time I had 3 roles actually: trainer, speaker and visitor. And that was extremely cool.

.NET TDD class

I’ve never done any trainer job before, so I was little worried of how it goes. With respect to XP practices we decided to do it in pair with Sergey Kalinets.

Our group consisted of 12 students. After initial introduction I realized - wow, we’ve got a pretty strong guys here.. Most of group had some real TDD practice before and came to improve the skill and found out new techniques. We had a program for 2 days, which covers the theoretical intros to TDD and practical tips and tricks.

We used String Calculator kata which we used both days to warn up. This is very productive way of learning and improving and all guys in group absolutely loved that. I hope this kata became every morning exercise and would be shared among colleagues and be done together, which is great fun.

We had great tandem, together with Sergey. We know each other from Kiev ALT.NET community, but never worked closely. I was very surprised how similar initial experience of TDD we had, so there was absolutely no problem to collaborate. Sergey is very professional trainer, his confidence and experience ruled among these days, he managed to create the training in consistent way. Very naturally we divided technologies & tools, since Sergey works mostly with Desktop and WCF and I work with Web.

So, it went very fine as for me. Friday evening, when we’ve closed training I was very happy to receive feedback. I believe everyone liked what we did. If you guys are reading that, I would ask to put small comment to that post (yes, “+1” would be alright :)).

Conference

There was a lot of interesting talks. Unfortunately I had to miss several quality-proved ones by Sergey Kalinets and Dmitriy Pasko, I’m really sure that was great stuff. I liked several speeches the most: one by Mark Seeman about Convetions, that showed me how to write less code relying on conventions.. and lighting talk by Dmitry Mindra on software craftsmanship. It was so great and inspirational! I was touched with case regarding Dmitry’s father and his attitude to craft. At the end of speech I was happy to get yellow bracelet in return to my promise to:

  • Love the craft
  • Study and improve knowledge all the time
  • Share the knowledge with people around you

I hope I will do that!


dmitry mindra

My speech was dedicated to Approvals. Even I had some lack of time and did not manage to show final example I believe it worked great. The audience were very interactive and I felt the positive energy in the air.

I had prepared introduction part and code examples that I did just on stage. In my opinion the best way to show something to developers is to write some code, but unfortunately it took a little more time that I expected. Moreover, I received many questions at the very first example, so I had to calm down people a little saying “Guys, please wait.. I haven’t even started to show cool things” :)..


alexander beletsky

One nice feature of this conference was that all participant two small card which they could fill with feedback and give to speaker back. I was amazed people very stepping by, saying thank you and giving those cards to me. It turns out that most of audience not familiar with Approvals, so general comment was “Man, I would never heard about that, thanks for sharing it”.


good job cards

It was extremely pleasant to receive that feedback thought cards and twitter. I’m truly appreciate each good word I got from you guys. Totally I collected 22 feedback cards and treat it as very good result!

Conclusions

First of all, big kudos for all people who make this event happen: XP Injection, sponsors, speakers and visitors. Conference took place in business center Parus, which was a great idea. It is in a center of the Kyiv and has very suitable infrastructure.

As always, it was great pleasure to meet with people from other cities and countries, getting new contacts. I hope that’s not the last XP Days in Ukraine, not the last I’m participating in.

The slides from my speech is shared on SpeakerDeck. Also, I’m happy to help you with Apporvals, so do not hesitate to contact my skype or twitter.