« Memories of QCon San Francisco »

Last month I had the opportunity to be a track host at QCon San Francisco, and it was a very rewarding experience. There was a lot of stage-managing which had to happen behind the scenes, including ensuring presentations were collected, equipment set up, and ensuring that the speakers had everything they required etc... Needless to say, it was busy yet it was a great opportunity to get a view of a conference from the other side of the podium. We lined up several high-quality talks, including:

• Rod Johnson - Configuring the Spring Container
• Cedric Beust and Alexandru Popescu - Designing for Testability
• Brian Goetz - Concurrency, Past and Present
• Adrian Colyer - AOP in the Enterprise 

In addition, the last slot of the day was a discussion about what the future of Java development would look like, and we were able to assemble a diverse and rich set of opinions from Joshua Bloch, Chet Haase, Rod Johnson, Erik Meijer and Charles Nutter. The discussion was at times animated, and the room was packed beyond capacity (standing room only) - a good end to a good day.

When I wasn't running back and forth on Wednesday, I took the opportunity to talk to some of the people who were at the conference.
I was surprised to find that almost everyone was a manager of this, a senior engineer of that, or an architect. I was also astonished at the speaker/attendee ratio, and for several of the presentations that I attended (e.g. Charles Nutter's JRuby presentation) there were other Ruby Committers present such as Ola Bini and Obie Fernandez present. It gave the questions and conversations a richness that just isn't present at a normal conference.

On Thursday, my time as an attendee was cut short when Floyd asked me to take over the Java
Emerging Technologies track.  After another set of very good speakers including Charles Nutter, Jason Rudolph, Neal Ford, Adrian Colyer and Wayne Lund, I went to the QCon Speakers' Dinner. The talk of the night ranged from Agile food queues through Software Transactional Memory plus OpenLaszlo to JSR 277 (a contentious discussion) and Ruby hacking. It was a great chance to share some drinks with people I'd previously only read about.

The keynotes were also quite good. I wasn't able to catch all of Kent Beck's keynote because I was busy preparing for my track, but everything I heard was well-presented and made a lot of sense. Richard Gabriel also had a very interesting and well-crafted stroll through the history of programming languages - who knew that there were programming languages that used color and pictures to represent the code? I was also captivated by James Noble's Lego Hypothesis. It reminded me a lot of some things I've been thinking about, and we will be collaborating on a blog entry here in the very near future, so stay tuned! I also participated in several interviews, including Charles Nutter on JRuby, Rod Johnson on the Spring ecosystem, Cedric Beust on TestNG, and MLB.com on Silverlight. They will all be appearing on InfoQ in the future, with the JRuby interview likely coming out this month. 

Finally, if you are interested in a detailed summary of the conference, I wrote up a comprehensive summary on InfoQ.com. I hope you enjoy it... Thanks for reading.

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