Craft Conf 2018 retrospective

Both helped me reinforce some of the ideas I had previously and both provided plenty of new subjects to think about.

The workshop of Ben was a very interactive workshop. We were divided into 3 team and we had to build a prototype of a product. This helped us experience some of the agile techniques and ceremonies and see how we might better employ them in our regular work.

There was an Iranian guy among the participants I would have loved to talk to, but unfortunately he was not very talkative.

The workshop of Randy was an extension of some of the presentations he gave last year. We had quite a lot of discussion around the subjects he talked about.

From both workshops I came out with lots of material to digest and lots of pointers to further reading.

Speakers Dinner

While I was not a speaker, as the organizer of the hike after the conference I got invited to the speakers dinner. One of the strange things is that the speakers dinner of craft is about as large as some of the conference I attended earlier.

As I got to the venue, I met Melvin Conway, you know, the guy who created Conway's law and his wife. We had a really nice chat during the evening.

Another fun thing during the Speakers dinner was the speed-meeting organized by Llewellyn Falco. He gave everyone an piece of paper to create a "mind-map" of thing s we have done recently and things we are interested in. Then he asked us to match up with a person we don't know yet, exchange the papers, read the mind(-map) of the other person and ask them about some of the subjects the other person has listed. We did a couple of rounds of this. It was an interesting way to get strangers talk to each other.

The conference itself

There were plenty of great keynotes and regular talks during the conference. Luckily most of them were also recorded and thus you can watch them on the Craft Conf website.

The hike after the conference

As announce earlier I've planned a hike after Craft.

The actual route was:

The whole hike was about 14.79 km long.

We left at 10 am as planned, but we walked slower than planned. Some of the people gave up at the various points where we crossed public transportation as they wanted to see other parts of the city as well. I am glad these escapes points worked out well. We arrived to the high-end of the Budapest Cog-wheel Railway at around 4 pm and decided to have some meal there. A few minutes into our lunch it started to rain as if we were standing in a shower. We were really lucky that it did not catch us while we were hiking.

By the time the rain stopped and by the time we got to August is was already closed so we had to have our ice-cream at the near-by Jégbüfé. No, it is not bad either.

The group photo:

Standing left to right: Darren McLeod, Barbara McLeod, Rachel Normand, Bart Louckx, Tony Lærdahl, Mandi Walls, Randy Shoup.

Front row left to right: Seb Rose, Abigail Bangster, Lisa White, Rafael Ördög.

I am behind the camera.

The picture was taken overlooking the Hármashatárhegy Airport.

Szentendre - Skanzen with the Conways

On Sunday afternoon I met the Conways again and we went to Szentendre. First we went to the Skanzen, an open-air museum in Szentendre where buildings from various areas of Hungary were collected. After a short walk we went to the city center for a short sight-seeing and a tea.

TL;DR

I really enjoyed myself at the conference. I hope I will be able to give a presentation or a workshop next year, but even if not, I definitely plan to organize a hike again.

I already have the plans for it.