So, I literally just got back from San Francisco, having attended QCon there. As always, it turned out to be a great event, with fantastic people and a very interesting presentations on the schedule. As it turns out, me and Nick’s tutorial was on the afternoon of the Monday, so after that everything could just get better. … In fact, the tutorial ended up working very well. I was happy to have Nick there, so I didn’t have to do all the talking myself. And Nick is much better at Rails than me anyway. So it was definitely a success.
The morning before out tutorial I spent in the Erlang tutorial, which was fun. Francesco is a very good teacher, and we got through lots of material.
Having finished my stuff the first day, I spent the rest of the week cruising around, relaxing and hanging out with nice people. The Tuesday I ended up in Martin’s, Neal’s and Rebecca’s tutorial on DSLs. I’ve been in this tutorial several times, but it just keeps getting better. Especially Rebecca’s pieces on parsing turned out to be very well polished this time. And of course, they are all great presenters.
The Wednesday keynote with Martin and Rebecca was about architecture, and how agile can help architecture groups with their problems as well as help bridge the gap between developers and architects, that often exist in larger organizations. Very well done.
The rest of the Wednesday I sat in the “Ruby in the Enterprise” track. I found out that Merb 1.0 runs very well on JRuby. Jason Seifer pronounced JRuby the winner among all the existing Ruby implementations, which was nice.
And then I had to run away and do an impromptu JRuby presentation at the nearby Girls In Tech Developer Forum.
At the end of the day, I saw Dean Wampler mix up all the free floating ideas about polyglot programming, and talk about it in something that approached a cohesive whole (which I’ve never been able to do). A well done presentation.
I can’t say I got too much out of Kent’s evening keynote, though. I ended up going out for a quiet dinner instead.
The Thursday began Tim Bray talking about the future of storage mediums. This presentation was too far away from my interests to produce anything stronger than a “meh…”.
After that I have a large gap in the schedule – I was supposed to see some presentations, but ended up hacking on a new language grammar with Kresten instead. Great fun of course.
After lunch I sat in on Brian’s talk on concurrency with the fork-join framework. This one I think I’d already seen, so I ended up working on Ioke during it.
Dennis Byrne gave a very cool talk on DSLs in Erlang. There is some stuff you can do that’s totally unbelievable. Best talk of the day. Possibly of the week.
After Dennis talk I’m not sure what I did actually. No memory. Oh, that’s right, I looked at the JUG panel and then went to the speakers dinner. The JUG panel was among others Rod Johnson, Bob Lee and one of the Seam guys. There were some mention of Rails in a way that meant the persons mentioning it hadn’t actually used it. There was also some static typing bias (especially from Bob who said that static typing was objectively better than dynamic typing).
During the Friday I spent some time in the functional language track (and saw a very nice talk about using Haskell to work with music), and I also saw Eric Evans give a very good talk about Strategic Design.
And that was QCon San Francisco. A very good conference, as usual.
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