Open Space Code - a good day out

I spent my saturday with a group of programmers form around London taking part in the 2nd openspacecode event, I had never heard about these types of events before but it seemed like a great idea.

As a sole developer it can be really hard to 'see' what is going on in the industry, especially when all of my projects are based loosely around the same technology and 'patterns & practices'.

The day started with a short group planning session, where everyone is given the oppurtunity to put forward topics to discuss.
Following a brief democratic process we had our morning topics inplace - I was off to learn about BDD - Behaviour Driven Development

Thanks to Ian Cooper for filling us in on BDD, the topic was covered well and I got 2 main things out of the 2 hours or so.

1- I need to spend a fair chunk of time learning more about testing
2- I should probably take some time out to move some of what I do to c#

We then all headed off to lunch at Nandos!

The afternoon started with a quick planning session to decide what was going to be discussed over the afternoon session - I went a long to the DSL - Domain Specific Langauge talk.
Which although is probably not something I will be doing in the near future it is defeinitely a part of software development that I will have to use.

The day finished off with everyone back together to discuss the day, pros and cons etc.

Then something I have been looking to do for quite awile - I got to play on one of the few 'Microsoft Surface' devices in the world!
This is a cool piece of technology, if I had a spare £12k I would really like one, not sure what I would use it for, but there would never be a shortage of conversation starters (for those who haven't seen/heard about Surface, this one was an interactive coffee table with brains).

Special thanks to Alan Dean for organising a great event and to cochango for letting us use their really nice offices and allowing some of us to play on the Surface!

If you are a software developer and live in London and are keen to see how other developers do what they do, these events are what you are looking for!