My Experience at AONW 25

Agile Open Northwest 2025 was an amazing experience for me, and my first time attending an open space conference.

If you are unfamiliar with the term, open space as a concept is gathered around the idea of self-organization as a principle, with like-minded individuals concerning concepts, ideas, and problems that they deem worthy of discussing. Imagine going to a conference with no set speaker, but the attendees themselves create and bring up topics to discuss around a theme, which this year's conference centered on Connections. Read more about the open space concept.

A snapshot below shows the self-organized sessions that conference goers and organizers held on Day 2 of the conference.

And for how this relates to software and agile technical principles?

Extreme Programming (XP) work as a practice aligns very much with the same concepts found in open space, a.k.a self-organizing developers creating software that they care about, and provides intrinsic quality at every stage of development. But that's another topic for another blog post.

Some of my big takeaways from this conference:

Play is the opposite of Survival, We must walk with Intention in order to Keep up/Check-in with others, Search for Awe/Wonder in your life, and Keep Questioning why things are {they way they are}.

It was very refreshing to talk to humans again.

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Yeah, I know I'll be back next year!