QCon 2008 : Friday
Choices, choices. Which sessions shall I attend today? Hmmm, let’s see what the schedule says. Ah I like the look of both the Architecture and Ruby tracks. Interesting. Well, both tracks were run by a host named James (Govenor & Cox). Both hosts I’ll never forget. Both of them for the wrong reasons! Please, let me explain.
A QCon day starts with a summary from the track host that highlights what goodies they have planned for us conference junkies. It’s a good idea because, when done well, you can make an informed decision about whether it would be in your interest to stick around for the track sessions. I made the snap decision to see what the Ruby track had to offer. I arrived ten minutes before the start, I always do, armed with my coffee and chatting to other attendees about their interest in Ruby. And waited. Fixed an annoying iChat problem on my Mac. And waited. Still, no sign of Jame Cox the Ruby track host. And Waited. At 09:10, with no sign of the track host, I started to pack my things away and head out. If he can’t be bothered, I’m not interested. James saunters in, all smiles and giggles, bantering with other track presenters, whilst all the conference attendees look around slightly bemused. After a few more minutes of idle and in joke banter with the other track presenters, they finally realise that the track host has not delivered his summary. Am I being petty, probably, so I’ll rephrase.
The track host had not informed the conference attendees what was in store for them on the Ruby track.
Whatever! James shrugs it off and moves on to introduce the first speaker. I hear grumbles from adjacent attendees. Arrogance, bad planning, don’t care attitude, I couldn’t place it. For me, it was a clear display of, my time is more important than yours. Miffed and totally uninformed about the ruby qcon offering, I left. A couple more attendees left as well. Not good. Not clever.
I made a mad dash over to the Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About hosted by James Govenor. I was just in time to catch the last part of a chin posing session. Yes, you heard me right, chin posing. There I was, hot and bothered, messed about by those Ruby guys and being asked to chin pose. Not once, but several times. Now I’m not a grumpy person, but I paid to be at QCon. What’s happening QCon? Where’s the content? Am I in some fracing QCon parallel universe run by chin-posing Cylons? Where’s your pocket life saber when you need it?
Enter Randy Shoup of Ebay, the first presenter in the Architectures track. By damn, a welcome save. I had heard snippets of his thoughts at the panel on performance and scalability yesterday. However, we were treated to a full hour of the problems faced and solutions adopted to rollout out Ebay. A great talk by someone clearly very knowledgeable in the delivery of highly scalable and highly available systems. I managed to corner him for 15 mins and pick his brains around how Ebay manage their rollout processes and environments, given that it is not economically viable for them to mimic their production environment.
Unfortunately, Randy’s was the best talk, so it was downhill from there on this track. BBC did a talk about there architecture that was interesting for me because I have an interested in CMS-based architectures, Market Risk at BNP Paribas was good as well, salesforce was okay but didn’t float my boat and mySpace was not really a talk on architecture but more hacking around in the darkest areas of the .NET platform. Time for a change. So I decided to head back to the Ruby track and listen to what a panel of Ruby experts had to say about the language and Rails the web framework.
The panel consisted of Ola Bini of JRuby, David Chelminsky and Aslak Hellesoy of rSpec, Nic Williams and moderated by James Cox. I’ve never met Ola and was the first time I had heard him talk. I like they way he listens to questions and presents answers. He actually cares. David and Aslak from rSpec also gave good answers. Nic Williams I thought, excuse the pun, derailed the panel discussion. Everything had to be joke. Right back at you. I’m clever. Look at how funny I am. It got really boring, really quickly. I was there for answers, not lip. I don’t think I’ll ever attend a Nic Williams talk if this is the way he presents. Don’t get me wrong, I like jokes. But comedy is all in the timing. As a result, I got nothing positive from this panel and it re-enforced general view of Rubyists as childish, myopic, clever coders. After the panel, as I was walking down the stairs with other people that had just attended that panel discussion, the general consensus was a negative feeling towards the Ruby community. This is a shame because I love Ruby but that track did not make many new friends, particularly with the business folk in the audience that were looking at ways in which it could be adopted within their organisations. Anyway, enough said on that.
The conference was wrapped up with a panel of experts that spoke about their take-away points from the conference. And that was that.
Will I go to QCon next year? Definitely. A top conference that on the whole put you in the room with some really interesting people. Good stuff…