Software People Inspiring

Software Craftsmanship 2013 Will Be The Last

With just four days to go, this would seem like a good time to reveal that this Friday's Software Craftsmanshiop 2013 will be the final SC conference.

With more and more events springing up to serve the SC community here in the UK, it's inevitable that we'll be spreading ourselves a bit thinner, making fundraising events like SC20xx less viable.

But we've had a good run. A very good run, in fact. We were the world's first SC conference, and over the last 5 years we've raised in excess of £40,000 to support important work being done at Bletchley Park and The National Museum of Computing.

I'm also very proud to have maintained the founding principle that sessions must feature live hands-on coding and bags of audience participation. This has brought us some of the most innovative, challenging, and above all fun sessions we've seen at dev conferences for many years. It has also had the added side-benfit of excluding the usual suspects among conference speakers who tend to be - as my mother might put it - "all mouth and no trousers". Although we've consistently struggled to find session leaders (it takes cohones to code in front of a room full of, well, us), the standard of the sessions has been consistently high. Conferences take on a whole different character when session leaders have to show as well as tell.

What's really made the difference, though, is the people who've come along. You've rolled up your sleeves, powered up your laptops and had a go. And the buzz at every SC conference has been a joy to experience. In previous years, the conference had sold out before we announced any of the sessions, and above all else, people came to share their passion for a day with likeminded craftsmen and craftswomen.

To you, I express my deepest gratitude. If you're joining us for the Last Hoorah on Friday, let's make sure we go out with a bang.

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