I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage. It's always good to get in a conversation like this with Kent, as I commented during the the session my career is “mostly about writing down Kent Beck’s ideas”. Given the timing, AI dominated the conversation - we compared it to earlier technology shifts, the experience of agile methods, the role of TDD, the danger of unhealthy performance metrics, and how to thrive in an AI-native industry. Gergely summarized the conversation in his newsletter.

I was on a panel at goto Copenhagen with Holly Cummings, Trisha Gee, Dave Farley, and Daniel Terhorst-North. We discussed the current state of software development and where it was heading. Given the timing, there was much discussion about the role AI would play in our profession's future.

One of the tracks at goto Aarhus gave NoSQL vendors the chance to talk about their various tools. At the end of the track the various speakers were put on a panel to discuss some of the common issues involving NoSQL. Although I wasn't involved in the track (my talk came a couple of days later) I was involved on the panel.

The organizers of QCon London 2007, asked me to do a conference session on modifiability of architecture. I thought that rather than listening to me, the audience might prefer listen to some of the Thoughtworks architects whose ideas I usually repackage: Dave Farley, Ian Cartwright, Fred George, Erik Doernenberg, and Daniel Terhorst-North. InfoQ has now put up a video of session.

The OOPSLA 2007 conference occurred on the 20th anniversary of Fred Brooks's famous paper “No Silver Bullet”. So to mark this, we had a retrospective panel, including the Mr Brooks. I was lucky enough to be invited on the panel, although I doubt they expected quite the contribution I ended up making.

I took part in a 20 minute long panel discussion on the declining participation of women in tech and what we should do about it.