On September 5th and 6th, I joined about 20 other people at the Brighton Recreation Area in Brighton, MI for the Agile Summer Camp. This camp was the brainchild of Josh Holmes and Chris Woodruff. I was lucky enough to be brought into the planning a couple months ago, so instead of heading to Chicago for Codeapalooza like a lot of my colleagues, I spent 2 days talking, drinking, talking, walking, talking, drinking and talking. 
Friday night was supposed to be the opening circle, but we decided to postpone that until Saturday morning. That didn’t affect the quality of the conversations Friday night though! It was really cool to sit with some super smart people and talk about software development. I didn’t got to bed until after 4am because I was so caught up in a conversation about TFS with Steve Andrews and a couple others. Good times!
Saturday brought the opening circle and a bunch of great sessions including an overview of agile methodologies, agile for the independent consultant and software complexity. Martin Shoemaker did a great job keeping notes, so check them out.
It was great to hang out with so many smart people. It was really nice to be focused on the conversations and not on laptops, slides or code. Everyone was concerned about phone batteries, so for the most part, people didn’t even twitter during the event.
In the end, any pain of being without electricity or running water was overshadowed by the learning and the strengthening of friendships. Good times.
