… or, “work isn’t supposed to be this much fun”
I’m just about recovered from our whirlwind trip to Nashville for the Agile Alliance’s conference Agile2013. There were 1700 attendees, 200 sessions, keynotes, parties, and a little controversy. On a personal note, I was gratified to see the number of women in technology there… most specifically, the number of women who gave talks. Encouraging women to take leadership roles in technology is a side project of mine – I help run a blog and mentoring program at ALineAtTheLadiesRoom.org. So for me personally, Agile2013 was a blast!
I bumped into so many people I know from various “former lives” – a former engineering manager, a former engineering colleague… folks I know from Agile New England – as well as hanging out with my colleagues at Tasktop (into the wee hours of the morning 🙂 ). It was also terrific to meet Tasktop partners, customers and prospective customers. I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in our booth, chatting with people who often started the conversation with, “My friend told me I had to stop by your booth. Can you really integrate <product A> with <product B>?
We’ve got so many systems that don’t talk to each other and… “ This kind of conversation is HUGE fun for me; I haven’t cut code, fixed bugs or managed a software deployment in a while, but still love helping those that do.
Mik delivering his session
I also had great time listening to Tasktopians give their talks. Mik Kersten, Tasktop’s CEO presented: “As distributed as it gets: 10 Agile best practices from open source” and Dave West, our Chief Product Officer presented: “Agile ALM – A horror/feel good/fantasy story”. And while it’s not the same as hearing his talk, you can hear a bit of Dave’s perspectives in two video interviews that were done at Agile. One by DZone and one from BigVisible.
While at Agile, Tasktop made a couple of announcements. On Monday, we announced our partnership with Serena, and on Tuesday we announced the GA of Tasktop Sync 2.8. Our CEO Mik blogged about this release, time tracking and how we’ve connected the worlds of Agile ALM and Project Portfolio Management (PPM)… it’s definitely worth a read. So, were you at Agile2013? What was notable for you?
