Devlink open spaces

This past weekend I had the great opportunity to attend Devlink once again. Every year seems to be more of an adventure than the last…and include a trip to some random Waffle House.

Last year at Devlink I focused on attending sessions and learning as much as I could from the top notch speakers. There’s a lot to be learned from these sessions as you get to sit back and take notes and focus in on a particular topic the speaker has prepared for. These sessions typically end in a round of Q&A where the speaker responds to questions from the audience.

I think most conference goers get the most value from this little amount of interaction between the speaker and the audience. Direct questions resulting in direct answers: “How do you handle xyz?” or “Have you run into issue such and such?” Sometimes the speaker has the answer other times you get a response from another member of the audience.

Now what if you take this last 5-10 minutes of value and expand it out into a whole 1 hour block of time. You get an open spaces session.

This year Devlink introduced the Open Spaces concept in addition to the “eyes front” sessions and had fantastic results. The spaces ran at the same time as the regular sessions and offered quite the variety. Topics ranged from “What they should be teaching in college?” to “Why comments are evil” all the way to some interesting discussions around the philosophy of “should” in relation to TDD/BDD.

Everyone participates, everyone learns something and if you’re not learning from that particular discussion, get up and walk over to the next one. The main point is to learn learn learn.

I think the overall attendance and excitement around the open spaces really shows that the true discussions and true learning are happening in the hallways of these conferences, not sitting in a classroom.

UPDATE: After some converstation on twitter I realized that this comes off a little anti-eyes forward. I don’t want it to sound like that all. Those sessions offer some great value to a lot of people. Some people don’t feel comfortable in the conditions that “spaces” provide, others are new and find that a class room enviroment works best for them. To each their own.

One way open spaces work great as a way to continue the discussion or lessons that were discussed in an eyes front session.