I’m at SD Best Practices. First impressions:

• Agile development has 90% of the mindshare based on the talk schedule—yet very few people seem to be doing it based on the few conversations I’ve had. It feels like a disconnect between the speakers and the audience. We’ll see if the trend is real or a statistical fluke.

• Anyone who is a ‘regular attendee’ (as opposed to ‘speaker’ or ‘expo only’) is issued a “VIP PASS” badge. Did someone really think that giving a few thousand people a VIP label would make them feel important?

Unrelated to SD, but kinda fun: when I got to the hotel, I was informed that they’d overbooked, and so I was offered me the “choice” of paying for a room in another hotel or getting $100 paying for the hotel myself. I did the latter, which is going to save the company a chunk of change as well (the replacement hotel, was, shall we say, ‘down-market’). Then I went to dinner at a California Pizza Kitchen restaurant (I know, I know, but it was open and I needed food), ordered a glass of wine, salad and a pizza, drank the wine and ate the salad, then waited a while, only to be told that they’d shut down the oven because they needed to prepare for an “inspection” the next day (you have to love these ‘surprise’ inspections), and so the pizza I’d waited for for half an hour wasn’t coming. It ends pretty well—I got a generic pasta dish and they comp’ed me the entire meal. So far, Boston’s pretty cheap—disorganized, but cheap.