Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Scandinavian Developers Conference in Goteborg, Sweden. I flew out on Sunday afternoon with my friends Matthew McCullough and Paul Rayner, who were also speakers at the conference. We arrived in Göteborg on Monday afternoon and checked into the Hotel Gothia Towers, finding comfortable rooms with all of the free, fast broadband a geek could want. This is the stuff of Norse epics.

The conference’s organizers treated the speakers to an exclusive dinner on Monday night at a nearby restaurant whose name was sadly lost to jet lag. Conversation flowed freely for hours among world-class talents whose company I was honored to keep.

The show opened on Tuesday with a keynote by Michael Feathers. Michael observed that the software community has thought less about design and more about process in the past decade. He suggested that web-scale computing heralds a return to constraint-based engineering, which will cause some strain in previous approaches to design and will likely overthrow the recent emphasis on process, restoring engineering to a prominent place in the work of the software developer.

On Tuesday, Matthew and I led a fishbowl discussion on “the dire need for encryption in web apps.” Technology topics often provoke emotional disagreements and highly affective conflict, but encryption is rare in that it also to touches concepts and passions that are as much social and political as technical. We spoke very little of key lengths and rainbow tables and much more of the economics of encryption, the nature of private property, and the relationship between the State and the individual. Our community needs more panels like this one.

The show’s seven tracks covered many topics, but overall evinced a heavy emphasis on Agile and Lean methods. Diana Larsen’s keynote on Wednesday morning riffed on the role of the manager is the agile organization, describing leaders more as curators of human flourishing than directors of mechanical activity. The more I interact with agile thinkers, the more I’m persuaded that this is a philosophical program I can get behind.

I spoke Wednesday afternoon in the Emerging Technologies and Cloud Computing track on how to use Grails and JMX together. My talk gave a lightning overview of Grails for the uninitiated (which turned out to be nearly everyone in attendance), a quick refresher on JMX, a video tutorial on how to manage Tomcat from VisualVM securely and over a public connection, a description of the Grails plugin architecture, and a quick tour of the kinds of the things the Grails JMX Plugin will let you do. It ended with a live demo of controller action statistics exposed by the plugin as MBeans. We even ended five minutes early!

I ended the conference with Kent Beck’s talk on Wednesday afternoon about the organizational changes necessary to release often. He discussed the kinds of organizational structures implied by a discipline annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, and continuous releases—fascinating process thinking from a true thought leader. I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting with Ken, his partner Cindee, and two of their daughters at Dinner 22 after the show. Our discussion of value-based consulting and integrating family life into a heavy travel schedule was more helpful to me than two hours of TDD mentoring would have been—and it’s not like I couldn’t use expert help with the latter.

Which is to say nothing of the reindeer steak, which may end up being the best food I eat this year. Time will tell.

Matthew, Paul, and I spent Thursday exploring Göteborg. Despite the cloudy and cold day, we found that the city had much charm to offer. It is safe, clean, and offered plentiful cafes filled with earnest, multilingual conversation, coffee, and all the baked goods you could metabolize. (Wifi was less than plentiful, but we managed to survive.)

The conference itself was superbly organized and run—and I don’t say that only because they had the foresight to accept a talk on Grails. The organizers took good care of their speakers, selected world-class headliners, incorporated sponsors in an appropriate way, and encouraged some nontraditional forms like the fishbowl talks and the open-space-style “conversation corners.” A huge thanks to Lennart Olsen of Iptor Konsult AB for his outstanding work, and especially for his coaching of my Swedish—which, as he pointed out, is not nearly as good as my surname might suggest!

It was truly a world-class conference which I’d be happy to attend again next year. Thanks to all who made it possible.

Here’s a partial list of my speaking engagements over the next few months. Another event or two may pop up, but this is it for now. If you’re near one of these, I’d love to meet you!

• 3/11: Memphis JUG. I’ll be speaking on Practical Agile Database Development (featuring Liquibase). This talk is sponsored by the Mid-South Software Symposium.
• 3/12-3/13: Twin Cities Software Symposium in Minneapolis, MN. I’ll be giving all four of my No Fluff talks: Agile DB Development, Slaying the Legacy Dragon, Open Source Business Intelligence, and Decision Making in Software Teams.
• 3/16-3/17: Scandinavian Developers’ Conference in Göteborg, Sweden. I’ll be speaking on Managing Grails with JMX.
• 3/30-3/31: Orbitz Tech Talks in Chicago, IL. This is a private event, but an exciting one for me. I’ll be speaking on my favorite language, Groovy, to a group of developers at at this very tech-savvy organization.
• 4/9-4/10: the Greater Illinois Software Symposium in Bloomington, IL.
• 4/23-4/25: the Mid-South Software Sympsium in Memphis, TN.
• 4/30-5/2: the Northern Virginia Software Symposium in Reston, VA.
• 5/21-5/23: the Gateway Software Symposium in St. Loius, MO.
• 6/14-6/17: Überconf in Westminster, CO. This will feature my four No Fluff talks plus talks on Gaelyk, a deep dive on Talend Open Studio, and a big-idea talk on complexity and software development. I’m really excited about this conference! Register here.