[Sorry for those who got an incomplete post, hit Publish
again when I was meaning to save]
So, yesterday went to
StackOverflow DevDays in London. I'll start with the bad part:
Organization: Massive queues to pick up food or coffee. FAIL. No 10 minutes break between speakers. FAIL. Mics failing. FAIL. The chairs EPIC FAIL.
The content: I understand that FogCreek is putting some money to sponsor the events but Joel run 2 completely sales focused sessions, one about FogBugz, the other one about FogCreek. Didn't enjoy either. Please remember that this is not a free conference. Fair enough, it's not pricey either (£85) and I'm not sure if they cover expenses with tickets only, but it just felt too much advertising. I'm not alone,
read the twits. BTW, I wonder if they got similar feeback in the US.
That's it for the bad part, now the good part.
Joel: when not doing a sales pitch, he is very funny and a great speaker. The intro video with Jeff was a lot of fun.
Jeff: the same. It was like a live Coding Horror post, always very inspiring.
Now the GREAT part:
Jon Skeet: really funny, probably the best speaker and that I didn't see coming. Put in perspective that Jon Skeet is the SO user with highest reputation and such a badass that he has earned
his own facts, much like Chuck Norris! I would love to see him again, FOTB next year? People loved him. He talked about the absolutely mess that is working with dates, strings and numbers in computers due to so many different standards. All this with a sock puppet in his right hand.
Things like
Argentina decided this year NOT to follow daylight savings and warned the world only 11 days before hand. Well done you guys!
Christian Heilmann: another very good speaker. He's a Yahoo! evangelist and I can see why. He demoed
YQL and I I had a question banging in my head all the time:
Why nobody told me about this before?!?!?! It's a Yahoo! service to mashup open APIs and it looks REALLY powerful and something I'd definitely look into. Not sure for what yet, but looked very, very cool.
Pekka Kosonen: He works for Nokia and gave a talk about
Qt (since when Qt has been pronounced "
cute"?!?!?!) that, for those who don't know, is the framework Nokia finally bought not long ago for building cross-platform *
native* applications (including phones and all major desktop OSs). Well he was VERY honest about Nokia. I mean, very, very honest saying things like "
we used to suck a lot, now we are getting our act together". He was very funny, the sort of speaker that doesn't laugh his own jokes, even when they are good. The honesty was very refreshing after the sales-oriented talks. Again, I wonder what would a US company do should an employee speak *
the truth* that about them. Wonder what Joel was thinking (something along the lines "
I would SO fire this guy as soon as he's off the stage").
Some pearls to put in t-shirts:
Joel: "The mother of all options is giving the user a compiler"
Jeff: "Don't be afraid of failing publicly "
Pekka Kosonen: "Light at the end of the tunnel, this time hopefully not a train"
Pekka Kosonen: " I wrote a Java book but was only for the money"
Phil Nash: "
Objective C is like Marmite: LOVE it or HATE it" *
J Mark Pimp about Obj-C: "80s called, they want their memory manager back" // <-- HILARIOUS
There were other speakes as well, they did a decent job. There was a nice intro to iPhone development, a nice intro to Android development, a nice intro to jQuery, a rather dry talk about compilers and a rather drier talk abut Python. Not bad for a single day.
Would I come back next year? I'll have to think about it.
* For probably anyone outside of the UK:
Marmite is a cream that literally people either love or hate, they even say it in
their adds. Me? Haven't tried it!
