SDN Meeting March 2011

On the 18^th of March 2011 Tim and I went to the first SDN meeting of the year. We departed from Gouda at 9:15. The conference started at 10:00 so there should be time enough to travel to Zeist where the conference was held.

We arrived at 9:50 and tried to access the conference center, but there was a big bald security guy who said that parking at the conference terrain was not allowed and he gave us a route description for a parking place and shuttle bus that would drive us to the conference terrain.

We shred the route map in a thousand pieces, drove to the nearby Praxis and walked back to the conference terrain, because otherwise we would be late. The security guy could not appreciate this at all! “Didn’t I gave you a route map 5 minutes ago!” he asked. “Yes you did” we answered. “Didn’t you read it?”, “No we didn’t” we answered. At that very moment his head turned red like a tomato, he ran to his car and was about the send five really big dogs after us! We ran faster than we ever did and made it to the door, just before the dogs would do the same thing to us as what we did to the route map. A really warm welcome!

So after the easy trip to the conference we attended two sessions named “One man, a whiteboard and three markers”. It were two awesome hours, where we talked about architecture, design patterns, dependency injection and lots more. A lot of the solutions discussed during this session are already part of our development framework, but I also learned a lot of awesome tricks to improve our work. The speaker, Sander Hoogendoorn, is always really inspiring. I would recommend any developer, project manager or database developer to go to one of his speaking gigs.

Our third session after the really good lunch was about Use Cases. This session was also really good and we learned new stuff again. After this third session we took the backdoor to avoid the guard with his dogs and went back to Rotterdam to launch the new VI Company website. Overall an awesome day with lots of new insights!