SoCraTes UK 2024 trip report

In September 2024 I attended my second SoCraTes conference, and once again, it was enlightening and fun. There are two formal parts to the conference - a training day, and then two days for the unconference. I say formal parts, because there are plenty of informal sessions as well. One of the great things about SoCrcaTes is that we all stay at the same hotel, so there is loads of opportunities for social interaction. You meet people at breakfast, you maybe go for a walk with other people, there are board games and music sessions in the evenings... It's a strange mixture of really intense and very relaxing!

There's a lovely Italian Garden at the hotel, which is a very nice place to sit and chat:

SoCraTes has a pretty strong XP focus, but there are plenty of non-technical discussions and workshops too. 

The day before

This year, the conference was at Milton House Hotel just outside Didcot in Oxfordshire. So on the day before the conference, I took the train from Edinburgh to London, and then out to Didcot, arriving at the hotel at about 3pm.  At the back of the hotel is a beer garden that spills out into wooded parkland, and I sat there chatting to other people as they arrived. We had a very nice dinner together, had a few drinks, and then I went to bed. 

Day 1 - Training Day

On the first day of the conference, we started with a fun TDD session with Jon Jagger, playing with CyberDojo. We paired up, and worked on the Poker Hands kata. Jon then moved us from group to group, so that we kept working on different codebases, and different approaches to solving the problem. I really enjoyed it, and it gave me a few ideas for the Coderetreat that I'm helping to run this November.

The second session I went to was Functional FizzBuzz with Duncan McGregor. This ended up being a bit of an open-ended ensemble session, playing with CoPilot, and exploring how it could help or hinder us as we played with the kata. 

The third session was one of the highlights of the conference for me: an Introduction to Systems Thinking, by Diana Montalion and Andrew Harmel-Law. We learnt a few bits of vocabulary - Events, Patterns, Underlying Structures, Mental Models - and then had a go at modelling a situation using the Iceberg Model: 

 

The final training session of the day for me was High-level design: a test-driven approach by Jason Gorman. This was good session on some design practices using index cards to plan out a basic architecture to solve a real-world problem, and make sure that we're avoiding the old God-Object design, and distributing our behaviour through the classes.

After this, there was an introduction to the Open Space that was going to happen the next day, and a chance to meet everyone who had turned up for that, but not the training sessions. 

Then there was dinner, and after that, a few of us had brought guitars and, pianos or fiddles, and we had a nice session singing and sharing songs

Day 2


I started the day with a nice run around the parkland behind the hotel, and then breakfast. Then the Unconference itself started. With an unconference, there is no fixed agenda. Instead, there are fixed timeslots, and a fixed set of rooms. Anyone can propose a session, and, after presenting it to the group, find a place on the agenda board for it. The sessions were a real mix of deeply technical coding problems, interpersonal communication or organisational dysfunctions, and everything in between. I made the mistake of proposing three sessions, which meant I missed out on other people's great sessions. 

My first session was one I proposed, where I asked for help with feature flags in a regulated environment, where there is a long lead time on getting approval to release a feature. We didn't really come up with any great solution, but the discussion was still really good!

My second session was looking at some of the XP practices, and seeing which if any, anyone found contentious. Not surprisingly, very few people disagreed with them, but many people struggled to use them in their organisations, and that led on to a good discussion. 

After lunch, I went to a good talk/workshop on the C4 model, and using Structurizr to render them using a simple json-like DSL. This session was disrupted by a very intense thunder storm, with loads of lightning and hail which we all stopped to stare at!

Then I ran a workshop on Example Mapping, teaching people the basic mechanics of running a session. I was fortunate that Ciaran McNulty came along too, because he runs these kind of training sessions for a living, and he really helped to make it work.

My last session of the day was another one that I'd proposed - playing with the Gilded Rose. Only one other person came along, but we had good fun practicing the Lift-Up Conditional refactoring, and then how to do a large-ish refactor is small steps where the build and tests stay green throughout.

After that, I missed the retrospective at the end of the day, because I spent an hour or so in the pool and the sauna with a few other people! They were all talking about the excellent session on Confidence, which I had missed. You can't go to everything...

Then, after dinner, a few of us sat around singing songs again, while some other folk worked on the bash scripts of a real website that wasn't deploying properly.

Day 3


This was another Open Space day, but this time I decided to not propose any sessions myself, so I could make the most of everyone else's ideas. 

The first session was from Seb Rose, and was called "BDD Reboot". We did a couple of exercises on BDD, and Seb did a great job of highlighting how Discovery and Formulation are the cornerstones of BDD, and that test automation is an optional extra.

My second session was run by Raimo Radczewski and called "What to do in tech until Pension". We discussed the current recession and how it compares to previous ones, AI hype, boom and bust cycles, and the coming climate catastrophe. Despite the content, the conversation was really fun!

After lunch, I went to a discussion on the book Plurality by Audrey Tang. I was feeling a bit drained by it all during this session, and decided to go and sit in the Italian Garden with a hot chocolate for a bit. 

Then I joined in a discussion on giving and receiving feedback. There was an interesting mix of very junior people and another person like me who's been line-managing for years, and a couple in between. We talked about how its better to look for solutions to issues, rather than to blame people for their poor performance, and how performance is mostly a systemic issue.

After that, I dived into a technical problem, helping Anita W work on her Android Chess Game. I was a bit frustrated that we didn't have any tests, and kept verifying things by running the app and checking the logging, but it was still good fun, and I really enjoyed working with Kotlin.

The final session I went to was a mindfulness session out in the parkland behind the hotel. About ten of us wandered out to a quiet spot, and Mervi Tyczynska led us through a lovely guided meditation. We stood in a circle with our eyes closed for about ten minutes. After that was over, it took most of us another ten minutes to bring ourselves back to normal, as we wandered through the field in the beautiful late afternoon September sun.

After that, we had nice closing session and retrospective, before going for dinner. After dinner, we had an excellent Lightning Talk session, followed by PowerPoint karaoke, which was hilarious! Then we had a final jamming session, before calling it a night. 

Day 4 - the day after

Quite a few people went for a walk in the Sunday morning, but I had a train to catch, so I set off about 09:30. Unfortunately, my train to Birmingham got cancelled, so I had to head in to London. The East Coast Mainline was closed after Newcastle, so I had to take a very crowded train to Carlisle, and then a much quieter one home to Edinburgh. Not the best end to an otherwise excellent few days, but I can't wait for the next one!

Because so much of the magic of Socrates happens outside of the sessions, it's hard to put into words how much I learnt at the conference. Talking at dinner about Plato, Christianity, the Big Bang and information loss to black holes... Having coffee and discussing TDD techniques... Going for a swim and talking about racism in tech and in the wider society... Comparing Welsh and Gaelic grammar... Playing my guitar along to some excellent jazz on the piano... Seeing some outstanding improvisational comedy during the PowerPoint karaoke... It all helped to make it a magical experience!

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