QCon 2008 : Summary

Posted on March 23, 2008
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QCon London 2008 ended just over a week ago. It’s taken me over a week to get back into the swing of things at work. Over the next few days I’ll let you know my thoughts but let’s start with the conference as a whole.

Firstly, the venue. Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre is a rabbit’s warren. It’s difficult to find your way around so expect to spend your first day back tracking and walking aimlessly about. That said, it does the job and is easy to get to with Big Ben (which is actually a bell and not a clock), marking the spot.

The first two days of the conference were taken up with tutorials. I attended the first day of tutorials on Domain Specific Languages (more on this later on in the week). Upon arrival I was given my badge and a huge folder, I mean huge, that was never going to fit in my rucksack and all for 40 sheets of A4. No big deal but a tad inconvenient on the unfriendly london underground.

Wednesday saw the start of the main conference. Upon entry I was handed my goodie bag full of marketing stuff. The only thing of value was the conference program and the itself bag. I ditched everything else.

The conference organisers have obviously done this before. Within 5 minutes of arriving, I was sitting down, on-line, drinking coffee, reviewing the conference course materials, and knew where I needed to be for the kick-off. Also, OReilly was there with a very generous 35% off all books bought at the conference. Not only that, if the book you really wanted had sold out, OReilly would ship it to you at no extra cost. Nice touch!

A couple of other nice touches were the feedback forms and daily program schedules. The feedback forms were actually just a small sheet of blank coloured paper. Red for rubbist, amber for ambivalent and green for great. If you wanted to add a bit more feedback, just write on the blank paper. Also, the super convenient daily program schedules that were just a pint-sized copy of the day’s talks that could fit into your conference badge. Simple but extremely useful.

On Thursday, just after the excellent keynote by Kent Beck, the conference organisers announced that there were 250 infoq mini-books up for grabs outside the main hall. Obviously, there was a mad rush to get out and those that sat near the back were quids in. Now, anyone who as more than one kid, knows that if you hand out treats you (1) make sure there are enough to go round and (2) there are all the same treat. Break any of these rules and you get unhappy kids. There were a lot of unhappy kids after this little stunt. Apparently, and this may well be a rumour given that I didn’t see any, BUT there were copies of the Scrum MiniBook on offer. Phewy! However, by the time I got there all that was left was Starting Struts 2, which is funny really, because I don’t know anybody starting struts 2 these days…

I haven’t got much to say about the exhibits other than they are the same really where ever you go. Dangle the carrot of winning something, handover your contact details, and in a couple of weeks we’ll be in touch now that we’re best friends. Nothing new here, so let’s move along.

As for the social events, I didn’t make it out so…no comment!

Oh, another nice touch is that as talks finished the slides found their way onto the website pretty quickly. However, it is a click-intensive exercise downloading exactly what you need. Now this may well help the traffic stats for the qcon site, but its not really convenient for site visitors.

The conference content and the number of the experienced speakers was a step above most conferences. A lot of great talks that were evenly spread across the 3 days. Over the next few days, I’ll delve into some of the conference talks I attended. But what I know for sure is that I will not miss this conference next year. Well done to all those involved in making this a reality. Much appreciated.

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