I’ve got a number of tutorials, conference sessions and keynotes coming up over the next few months that I’m very excited about. My themes for this year are behaviour-driven development, SOA for human beings and understanding what simplicity really means. Looking at these, there is an overarching theme about getting different kinds of people talking to each other in plain English (for some value of English).

Keynote at QCon, 14-16 March, London#

QCon is the London version of the excellent JAOO conference in Denmark, which has become my favourite technology event of the year (apart from phone upgrade time). They attract world-class presenters to provide sessions varying from the deep technical through to people and process topics, and they’ve done the same with QCon. What’s more, they have managed to resist the lure of the sales-pitch session, which means you get to hang out with other geeks without people trying to sell you stuff. The London event is being run in conjunction with the common-sense guys at InfoQ, and I’m lucky enough to be speaking there.

I’m delivering a keynote with Martin Fowler about the gaping crevasse between what business people ask for and what technical people think they want. I’ve presented with Martin a couple of times before; at least I know I’ll only be the second loudest person in the room.

ThoughtWorks is a “platinum sponsor”, which I think means we get to buy more drinks than the other sponsors.

BDD in Ruby at ACCU, 11-14 April, Oxford#

ACCU is a conference by geeks, for geeks. With its roots in the C++ community, there are lots of strange people in weird industries like embedded systems, graphics engines and writing music software. It’s a refreshing change for me, where “enterprise systems” usually means moving data from over here to over there.

I’m actually at ACCU by accident, presenting behaviour-driven development in Ruby. They haven’t noticed yet that I haven’t touched C++ in ten years, and I’m not about to tell them.

However, the ACCU folks are developing a strong liking for dynamic languages—last year Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, delivered a keynote, and I co-presented a session introducing Ruby and Rails—so perhaps there’s life after the standard template library after all :)

Coaching workshop and BDD session at Expo-C, 23-25 April, Gothenberg#

You know the tutorial days that tend to happen either side of a conference? Well Expo-C has adopted the model of having mostly tutorial days and hardly any conference! The 23rd and 25th are tutorial days, with two speakers presenting full-day tutorials on each day (I’m on the 23rd). The middle day is made up of seminars by a number of presenters. As the only speaker who hasn’t published a book (one of the presenters, Jim Coplien, has a small library to his name), I can safely say it’s a very solid line-up. Also, it’s one of the smaller conferences so there is lots of opportunity to hang out with the presenters.

I presented a tutorial day last year around the theme of agile delivery and thoroughly enjoyed it. This year I’m doing something a bit different, focusing on “Change, Coaching and Communication”, using NLP and life coaching principles as the basis of a one day interactive workshop. As with last year, there won’t be any PowerPoint, mostly because I’m rubbish with PowerPoint.

I’ll also be presenting a behaviour-driven development session on the seminar day.

Keynote and SOA workshop at ROOTS, 25-27 April, Bergen (Norway)#

I’ve not been to ROOTS before but I’ve heard good things about it. It’s a developer-centric conference and this year it features the likes of Kevlin Henney, Jim Coplien (who I’ll be racing to Norway from Expo-C) and lovely testing guru Linda Rizing.

Erik Doernenberg and I are delivering a keynote on the nature of simplicity, and we’re running a three hour workshop looking at SOA for human beings.

Keynote and SOA workshop at ExpertZone, 23-25 May, Stockholm#

I met Josefin Andersson, one of the organizers of ExpertZone, earlier this year and she convinced me I had to attend the ExpertZone Developer Summit in Stockholm. Since I’m scared of Josefin, I said yes. Also Microsoft’s Beat Schwegler will be there, and he rocks.

I’ll be delivering another keynote with Erik Doernenberg, based on our current pet themes of simplicity and clarity of intent (honestly, how hard can software be?), and running the workshop on SOA for humans.

I’ve been told by the Boss that I’m not allowed out of the house in June.