Tuesday, March 16, 2010

QCon 2010

Our company was nice enough to send my colleague Sebastian and myself out to London to visit QCon. It was my first conference of this kind and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

What kept me away all those years probably was the fear that these kind of events just act as a sort of trade fair showing off some products or new technologies. Thankfully, that wasn't the case and the majority of talks weren't about what to work with but about how we work. It was truly inspiring (a word I'm sure will crop up again in this post) in that it reminded and reaffirmed me about the things I like about writing software.


I’m not sure I learned anything totally new – it was more an affirmation of things I’d thought / heard / read about – and a chance to see some of these things out in the wild. The speakers ran from big conference names to academics through some front-line experts, so a real range. I don’t think I attended a single sales pitch, and although a few named products slipped through the net, they were all OSS projects, not commercial products. All-in-all it seemed to stay true to the “for programmers by programmers” promise.