CodeMash Day 2

I meant to get this up on Friday, but the day got away from me. 

The morning keynote by Scott Guthrie was good, but I have a tough time getting excited about stuff like LINQ.  Yea, it’s cool technology, but until it’s “real” and in a released form, I’ll stick with what currently works. 

Mary Poppendiecks session on Lean Software Development was cool.  What she presented was mostly common sense, but I found the history to be quite interesting.  I think it’s funny how we tend to do the same thing over the years but give them different names.  At the book giveaway at the end of the day, I scored Mary and Tom’s book “Implementing Lean Software Development“, so I’m hoping to dive into that soon.

I missed out on the second session of the morning to deal with some business.  After my meeting ended, I talked more WoW with Jason Follas.  At one point, I even fired up WoW and showed him my main “toon” and a little of the Outland (new areas opened up with the recent expansion pack). 

After lunch I sat in the “Real World Continuous Integration” session given by Dan Hounshell and Joe Wirtley.  It was a good session, but I couldn’t help feeling it was missing something.  I’m not sure what exactly…maybe I was looking for more of a best practices session, but I still enjoyed it.

The final session I attended was given by Jim Holmes.  The couple of times I’ve seen him speak, he’s always entertaining and he certainly didn’t disappoint this time.  He’s given me some inspiration to look at mbUnit (again…my first experience with it sucked) and to also check out Rhino Mocks. 

The giveaway was good, but dammit….I wanted one of those Xbox 360s.