I just returned from our yearly Euricom retreat. This year, all forty of us got to spend four days in the South of Spain. Where we had longish sessions and a few workshops last year, we experimented with shorter talks this year - a la lightning talks, TEDx style.

This format made it possible for everyone to speak, but also forced the speaker to keep the scope of the talk focused, and to organize the information in a way that attendees can get the gist of it in only twelve minutes. This makes for high-energy talks designed to peak one’s interest, to share useful tips, to plant a seed or to pitch an idea.
Covering more than just technical ground alone made topics extremely diverse; from query tuning to empathy, from automated testing to how to explain your kids what you do for a living, from personal kanban to juggling with a diabolo. Going back and forth between these technical and less technical sessions kept my brain from being oversaturated.

Definitely an experiment that only yielded positive results; we will be using this format more frequently when organizing internal events.

Initially, I planned on doing a session on the DDD strategic patterns; the ubiquitous language, subdomains, bounded contexts, context mapping… but I couldn’t capture all of that in a meaningful way in less than twelve minutes. That’s why I started over, focusing on the ubiquitous language alone.

You can find my slides on Slideshare.