I’ve spent the last few days at the SoCraTes BE Unconference. Here is a brief report.

SoCraTes takes place at a holiday camp in a socialist realist château among the sheer wooded slopes of a Belgian Ardennes.

It’s an unconference, which means that rather than having a predetermined schedule, the participants apply the Open Space Principles to create each day’s schedule.

Here are some of the sessions I attended:

A group exercise creating a Wardley Map of a fictional shop. I’ve heard lots of people talking about Wardley Maps, but this was the first time I got to try them out.

A workshop practising a couple of Liberating Structures. I didn’t think I was familiar with Liberating Structures, but it turns out I’ve been using a few of them for a while! I particularly liked the Troika Consulting structure, and the problem we encountered enabled me to talk through a few techniques I’ve recently learnt from Goldratt’s Thinking Processes.

A nice group discussion on What makes a good stand-up? It turns out lots of us have encountered similar problems and found similar solutions. Hurray!

Talk like Sandi. We watched Sandi’s talk, Get a Whiff of This, and then had a group discussion about what makes her such a compelling speaker.

Code Smells quiz show. This was based on an activity I recently ran with my team, and as luck would have it, my friend Pedro, who wrote the source code for the exercise, was also at SoCraTes, so we ran this session together. It was really popular, and definitely worth repeating.

The Transport Tycoon exercise: modelling a delivery network. This gave us a good chance to compare Classic TDD and Domain Modelling techniques to understand this problem.

Making illegal state transitions impossible. A fairly involved look at modelling state machines in functional languages. We spent rather too long struggling with the language, but it was good to discuss the basic concepts.

Powerpoint Karaoke with each other’s presentations. This is always an entertaining evening activity. It’s usually played with random slide decks from the internet, but this time we challenged each other to improvise talks to presentations that other members of the group had once given.

I had a casual discussion with my friend Pedro Santos about how often personal and professional development is accompanied by pain (an idea that goes back to Aristotle: μετὰ λύπης γὰρ ἡ μάθησις), and whether we can find ways to teach and coach that break this dynamic. The use of games seems to be one approach, as they can offer a safe context for failure.

An introduction to Aikido, out by the river under the hornbeams as the sun went down.