The BEKK boot camp at Lyngørporten is slowly crawling to an end. After a few days with various lectures, we’re now roughly a day away from finishing work on our assigned case; putting together an application that can be used internally for recruiting new employees. Everything is of course agile, with Scrum as our software development framework/pattern/whatever (pick your poison). Add Struts2, Spring, Hibernate, JPA and mix everything together with the help of Test Driven Development and you have the perfect recipe for a state-of-the-art recruiting application.

Or maybe not.

The Scrum sprints are compressed down to a single work day, and it turned out that the product owner didn’t know much about the project when we started. We got a technical specification before our initial meeting with the product owner, but it was all lies. All lies, I tell you! In retrospect we most likely could have turned this to our advantage and tried to “help” the product owner to understand his real requirements, but of course everything looks all too clear in hindsight. Well, we live and learn - that’s probably the point of the boot camp.

But not all is hard work here down South of Norway!

I’m up at 7 every morning for a little bit of physical education. The options are many: Running, beach volleyball, football (a.k.a “soccer”) and swimming. In my case “swimming” would mean “near-death-experience”, so I opt for the safest option: Running. Since time is of the essence and we’re 6 people in each cabin who needs to take a shower after the workout, I’ve usually only jogged two or three laps on my own personal course. Each lap is a measly 1.5 kilometers, so it’s not that far, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Although this might sound like something that could be defined as hard work, I feel quite upbeat for the rest of the day - even though I might not look that way, I rarely do - and I’ve managed to stay away from coffee since we arrived at Lyngørporten.

In between the more serious, educational stuff, something always happens - organized by our Energizer bunny coaches. Be it more physical education, a boat trip to on the of the many islands nearby, fishing, a BBQ, kayaking or something similar. Not much time to read a book, and the three I brought with me can only be considered dead weight by now.

So to sum everything up, and I dare to sum it up even if we’re two days from departure¹: It’s been an interesting and educational ride, but getting back home will be good. Real good.

As a side note, I should probably mention that Lyngørporten is a very nice resort. Modern cabins, good food, great location. Everyone here speaks English in case you lack the necessary Norwegian skills to order beer and an nacho chips. The chef is British or Australian (I can’t decided) and we’ve stumbled across both British and American visitors. Oh, I almost forgot the most important of all: They’ve got Wi-Fi.