So that was XP2005. What an amazing five days.

Thanks to everyone who ran tutorials and workshops, presented papers or took time out from the northern ale to chat to me in the bar, and everyone here who let me go. I learnt so much and had a lot of fun doing it.

Highlights for me included:

• Charlie Poole‘s UI Testing tutorial, in which we learnt the how, when and all-important why of UI testing (sometimes you don’t have to)
• The Coder’s Dojo, in which we worked on the Game Of Life rules, and how to discount Harry Potter books
• Sitting outside on the grass, struggling with an out-of-sync clapping rhythm in the Music of Agile Software Development
• Laurent and Manu’s writing workshop, the amazing freewriting exercise and the feedback from the other attendees
• Learning how to sell XP to customers, and sharing some of the stories of pain and triumph
• The exhausting but entertaining exercise in The Drawing Carousel, and finally finishing the picture of Jack running for the beanstalk with a hen beneath his arm (Hubert Baumeister took pictures)
• Kent Beck’s closing speech on moving XP up a notch
• Feedback from new friends on pretty much every concept in my head, their patience in listening to me during various question sessions and their encouragement of my search for knowledge and understanding of Agile and XP.

I hope to run an Agile Haijin workshop at TW soon, in which we write haiku, learn about Eastern vs. Western ways of thinking, investigate parallels between Agile practices and haiku and learn to do The Simplest Thing Possible. Should be fun.