QCon London 2009 – How was it for you?
Posted on March 18, 2009
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This is me with the mac waiting for QCon London’s 2008 keynote by Kent Beck on Trends in Agile Development to kick off. QCon 2009 had notably fewer attendees than 2008. However, not knowing the exact numbers, it was still a large turnout for any technology based conference.
Did I enjoy QCon? Yes and No. For me it wasn’t as good at 2008. I thought the best talks were on Wednesday and Thursday, and I couldn’t make Thursday. However, I was co-host on the Financial Track. So although I really enjoyed the talks we put together there (See Kirk Wylie post on the track), you just have to miss some stuff going on in the other parallel streams.
Last year, when I was free from track host responsibilities, I’d duck and dive from one session to the next. This year, delegates were doing this in a more informed way through the power of twitter. Boy this was strange thing to behold. Delegates in all the sessions were tweeting away against #qcon as the speakers presented and listening in through tools like TweetChat. The net result was that speakers were being rated in real-time.
So what? Well if your listening and thinking of ducking out to a session and learn then that its boring or too high level, you don’t move. The reverse is true of course. The TDD session was packing up and lemming effect took hold. Ah, you think, if that’s packing up, I should be there as well. So, off you go, taking a few others with you.
It’s funny and unnerving I’m sure for a speaker to see 10 people suddenly stand up in unison and leave because of a well constructed tweet! Again, the reverse holds. On our financial track we had the head of hedge fund talk about computational finance and how they operate (fascinating talk but you just had to be there really, you simply don’t get it from the slides 
). Hedge fund guys DO NOT do this. So I, apologies to other speakers, crafted a cunning tweet letting people know that this talk was also NOT being filmed. And it wasn’t by the way. Two minutes later, I kid you not people, 10 people joined the talk, and another 3-4 after that. Twitter, you gotta love it.
Unfortunately, I could only attend QCon on Wednesday. But I did sneak in a cheeky speaker dinner on Tuesday night. There I caught up with my long time friend and early mentor, Linda Rising and was unleashed to the full on madness that is Dan North. Also, I managed to slip in a few cheeky beers at the Wednesday night QCon party. And of course, the conversations over food and drink are so much more interesting and involved than the ones you partake in during the day…
I’ll definitely be going next year.
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