So what do you think you get when you have about 2 dozen very smart and interesting techies together at a remote location where the only thing you can do is ski between 11:30 and 15:30?

That’s right, you get a _lot_ of geek talk!

SAW

I was invited to join this years Software Architecture Workshop which was held in remote Oppdal, Norway. This is a group of people that spend 3 days a year discussing al kinds of software related innovations and problems. SAW was originally introduced in Europe by Jimmy Nillson. The three days are formatted like an open space event, and I can tell you; that is a lot of information to swallow. This year was my first time, but I am going to do my very best to attend the other coming SAW gatherings.

Another cool part of SAW is that each year it is organized by different members of the group which means that next year it will be at a different remote location. Being remote is a key to this event, it ensures no interruptions.

Open Spaces

Like other open spaces at the beginning of the day everybody can put their meeting topics on a post-it, and place it on an open slot. Any topics that would not fit the schedule would be placed on a parking lot to be picked for a next round.

We ran three parallel tracks so there where enough good topics to choose from at any time. Before the day starts there is a marketplace; this is basically the opportunity to sell your topic to the other attendees. After that there is the change to negotiate with the people having the sessions if you want them to move it to another slot, incase you want to join two talks that run parallel. And of course at the end of the day the great discussions continued during dinner and in the bar till very late at night.

Sessions

The sessions I joined where about:

• Lean and Kanban
• Testing and Mocking
• Architecture (different topics, among CQRS that I hosted, REST, SOA and EDA)
• Creating a great presentation
• Systems Thinking

As you can see the range of topics is really wide and that is great, it enables you to go to a session where the topic is completely new to you and really open your mind.

Snowboarding

Each day had a break from 12:00 till 16:00, during this break there were no sessions planned (which of course didn’t stop everybody from talking about software), but for me this meant a great opportunity to do some snowboarding. Something I had never done before and I have to say that it went better then I imagined. I was actually able to get down the mountain, be it only sliding from right to left and back again facing down the mountain. But hey I was getting down the mountain. It was very heavy on the legs but loads of fun.

Finally

I completely loved the whole experience and would recommend everybody to go to Open Spaces events, they are truly the most interesting events where you learn the most. I do think the break is a necessary thing as doing this for eight hours straight would be to tiring for sure.

Mark Nijhof