October 2024

Attending Agile Open Northwest 2024 as a student and upcoming software engineer was a truly eye-opening experience that I firmly believe changed the trajectory of my career vastly for the better. While doing my finals during the conference was a tad stressful, it was still one of the most worthwhile investments of time I have made for my professional development. Bold claim eh? Let me tell you a bit more about why.

The Agile Open Northwest Experience

If you've never experienced an Open Space conference, I highly recommend it. With this crowd especially, the format just fits. One of the guiding principles of many leaders in this group is self-organization. These professionals push for this and utilize it in their day-to-day work, making them extremely practiced. The structure of an open space conference is based on self-organizing. With so many skilled practitioners, the conference runs super smoothly and shows a real-world example of the power of self-organization. Even as a student I felt accepted and a true part of the community. This was capped by Jon Reid giving me an unexpected shoutout at the closing circle, making me feel like after three short days, I was already one of the team.

My Personal Highlights

• Steve Kuo's 6 Minute Interview session:

  1. I volunteered/was volunteered to be the interviewee for this session. While it was absolutely terrifying having my coding and TDD skills witnessed by top crafters, I came away feeling more comfortable in my abilities and excited about a way of interviewing not requiring LeetCode.

• Evening Coding Sessions:

These sessions were truly something else. We would sit and work under the guidance of some of the top collaborative programming coaches with people from a variety of skillsets and backgrounds for hours. Through these evenings I came away with a strong understanding of what group coding is truly about and a urge to do more.

• Ted's TDD Game:  

This was a great game to play and really lock in my TDD fundamentals (so much so that I made sure to buy a copy for my school's Computer Science department!). My favorite part of playing this at AONW was implementing collaborative programming techniques to the game.

Key Takeaways

This section could go on for quite a while, but I'll keep it short. As someone just entering the industry, especially with the state of the tech industry currently, I have been pretty scared honestly. Agile Open Northwest 2024 was truly a salve to that fear. I came out of this conference with not just dozens of good professional contacts, but friends and mentors aplenty, all eager to feed my newly ignited passion for software craftsmanship (gotta love knowing coaches!). I would recommend AONW to anyone. Come with a passion for knowledge, connection, and fun; that's all you'll need to come away feeling fulfilled professionally and personally.

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