QCon 2008 : Thursday
Lazy me! I set a task to write up my three days at QCon within a week of the conference finishing. Yep, you guessed it, I’m not done. In fact, the InfoQ boys have already posted their conference takeaway summary. Never mind, here is my take on Thursday @ QCon.
I really enjoyed it. The keynote from Kent Beck was delivered in typical Beck fashion. Simple slides. Deep messages. Context dependency humour. You ain’t gonna get that from the slideware, but there it is.
Spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon in the Performance and Scalability Solution Track. I loved this track. It was good to have access to architects and engineers that as part of their day-to-day job deal with issues of scale that everyday developers only every read about. It was interesting to see the common understanding amongst these guys around scalability. The knowing looks they shared when they spoke about when database-centric architectures hit the scale limits. The typical things you need to do to approach linear scalability within your own systems. CAP Theorem. Amadhl’s Law. Clustered architectures. And so on.
And then, without a shadow of a doubt, the best individual talk of the conference was Kent Beck’s Effective Design. Kent broke down into very simple terms the thought processes he goes through during design and very kindly played them back to us in this talk. It was one of those talks, as someone said at the conference, that you left the room feeling dumber and that you had some serious reading to catch up on. I’m glad I never missed that.
And finally, I attended a talk by Jim Webber on Web Services, REST and MEST. More on Jim’s REST stuff can be found on the ThoughWorks podcasts. Also, I entered into a number of conversations and listened to speakers saying that there is definitely a shift in emphasis from web services to REST-based solutions. I am pleased about this and hope I don’t ever have to delve into the WS-* (read as deathstar). I’ve committed too much of my life to WSDL.
Anyway, that’s thursday done. A great day, leaving just Friday to write up.