P&P Summit Wrapup

Blog

Sorry this has taken me a few days to get to; however, due to a personal emergency things have been somewhat hectic around the homestead.  Oh, and of course, I don’t deal well with jet lag.

Overall the P&P Summit was a good conference.  I was a little suprised by the lack of in-depth technical talks, but I think that the “architect” crowd is probably a little hard to choose topics for.  Everyone has their own expectations and levels of experience when it comes to the term “architect” so I would think it would be hard to decide what was too technical to talk about.  For example, one day was almost completely on the Agile development methodology, which was a good topic; however, after the third talk mostly the same points just kept getting hammered on.  The last day was almost completely Software Factory based which yielded a lot of great information; however, I can download the software factory, read the docs, and tink with it myself.  I think it would have been a lot more interesting to hear about the process of creating one of the factories and why decisions were made the way they were (I’m sure some of that is in the docs as well). 

I was asked if I would go again next year if I had the chance.  Probably not. I got more immediate use out of PDC sessions than I did from the P&P Summit sessions, but the summit sessions were really good (mostly).  I’m glad that I went.

A few things I wish they had done differently:

  • They should not have had lunch sessions.  These tended to be about 20 minutes long and not that informative, or worse, just enough info that you wanted to hear more.  Plus, when you’re already sitting for 8 hours of sessions a lunch break is a nice time to get outside and get some fresh air.  Now, I know it was my choice to sit in there and hear the lunch sessions, but if you have the sessions I feel that to get my bang for the buck I should attend them.
  • Don’t hand out apples as snacks.  It’s a really loud food to eat during sessions and somewhat distracting (I’m going to post a do’s and don’ts for sessions in a few days that will include this as well).
  • It would have been nice to have been given the agenda for sessions and such on the USB key on the first day.  It would have been even better if they were in OneNote format so that you could just write notes up as they go in context with the slides.  They tried this with PDC and didn’t get the updated slides until too late so it didn’t work out too well. 
  • Not had box lunches of premade sandwhiches.  I ended up eating the salad mostly because I never liked the premade stuff (it already has sauces on it and such).  To their credit I am a picky eater.  A couple of the other conferences going on in the conference center had a more buffet style lunch where you go to pick out what you wanted.  I guess we didn’t pay enough for that.
  • A few more sessions on more in-depth topics.  For example, one talk was on designing for workflow.  How should you put together your application when you are going to be using a workflow engine.  This was a good talk, but I think more sessions centered around these types of design issues would be good.  They could even perform a survey of attendees prior to the summits asking what design issues they are having the most problems with and then center at least one of the talks around some of those issues.  Maybe even this kind of survey would let them understand where they need to provide more guidance packages.

Oh, and the new OneNote 2007 Full screen feature is sweet for taking notes during a session or talk.