I’m very keen on going to see what cross over there is between domain modelling for general purpose software systems and content modelling for content managed solutions, a particularly interesting area for me at the moment.

Hope to see you there

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.

So it’s that time of the year again. QCon London is back and I’m co-hosting the Architectures in Financial Applications track with Alexis.

I’m trying something different this year. I’ve set up a twitter hashtag called #qconfinance so that the twitters in (and not in) the audience can post questions that we can respond to in the breaks and even after the conference if we run out of time. Interesting to see how this works.

For twitter folks, TweetChat is a great way to view all tweets in a chatroom fashion. The hashtag, with the #, is the name of the chat room. Simple! Hopefully see you in there…

But I have, just for fun, been taking a look at Apache Sling and have just got as far as installing it. Baby steps…

Anyway, so long as you respect the Six Ps – Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance – then I think we’ll be okay. I’m so looking forward to my next spare 5 minutes of freedom…

Then I stumbled across Remember The Milk, another GTD powered application with the most amazing, read as simple yet powerful, set of integration services to tools you use to manage your everyday online life. Google, iPhone, Outlook, twitter…Done!

The only problem I have with RTM is the rather basic Mac Desktop Widget for managing your tasks when offline. I need something as least as good as iGTD to handle my stuff. Sigh! However, you can post tasks to RTM via twitter and use the Google integration to search and look through them, and when offline add tasks through the desktop widget. Nahh, way to complicated. Going to take a little bit more to get me off iGTD…

That said, anyone suggest some good people to follow on twitter…

Nice!

1. Go to the Computer Weekly Blog Awards Site
2. Select ‘The Long Way Round’ from the Programming and Technical Blogs combo box.
3. Hit Submit.

That’s it. Job done. Now, back to content…