There is old advice that says, “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.”

The last few weeks we’ve been working on sorting out the program. There might not have appeared to be much movement, but let me just put this out there… choosing the presentations was extremely difficult. We had almost 5X as many proposals as we could reasonably accept. Once we got it down to a pile that we all wanted, there were still roughly twice as many as we could squeeze into the program.

In the midst of that process, between Nate, Kay and myself, two of us started new jobs and the other moved an office across town… which might be why it seemed more like a duck diving…

I’ve never been the one making the decision about what talks to accept before, and I found it sad that there were a lot of good presentations that won’t be seen at Agile Roots this year. If your presentation didn’t get accepted, it doesn’t mean we didn’t like the idea. (I can’t claim that the process was better than arbitrary at some points… I realize now that’s just how these things have to go.)

The good news is I believe we have another great program for this year. We did our best to pick talks that we feel match the theme and complement each other. The lineup includes world class speakers, in addition to new voices providing unique perspectives, in a relatively intimate setting.

There are a few talks on the program that are the ones I always hoped someone would give… (but I’ll keep what those are a secret for now)

We hope you find the program compelling, and in addition promise to deliver good food, the opportunity to make new friends and two days focused on great software… to the best of our abilities.

Wish us luck…

Now back to paddling…