SPA 2007 Day 3
After lunch on day 3 of SPA 2007 I established that I am not very good at croquet. However, I am getting ahead of myself here.
In the morning I participated in Peter Eeles session on Architecting Large-Scale Systems. Although the session was well-led I have to say I didn’t get much out of it as the first 2/3 of the time was spent looking at definitions of Architect, Architecture and Architecting and I felt I already had a pretty strong grasp of these concepts.
This left only 1/3 of the time on the ‘Large-Scale’ aspects of the work. Speaking to Peter later he too seemed disappointed to have had this balance of time but I can see his point about needing to get everyone up to speed on the basic concepts before getting to the more advanced points.
The personal highlight of the day was a session learning (golf) croquet. We were taught a few basics and then let loose on a fairly bumpy section of the Homerton lawn. I managed to win a hoop over two games with different partners and even managed a few good tactical clearances but for whatever reason I cannot be called a natural at this game. James Robertson has posted a few pictures of the game here.
After this IÂ spent the afternoon debugging the spreadsheet I put together the previous day for my Scoping Game session. I’m not a big user of Excel so I’ve been pushing the limits of my experience with this one but I must say that I can see why some people find it so powerful for some kinds of task.
The evening saw me behind the bar at that day’s social event - a ‘champagne’ tasting. Five anonymous types of sparkling wine were on offer and bottle 3, which I was serving, proved very popular - either that or my generous servings were bringing in the crowds.
I don’t remember who the winner was but Tim MacKinnon came last and was duly awarded the booby prize of a bottle of Asti Spumante. The whisky BoF session followed but I steered clear of that and headed home as my session was on the following morning.
