QCon San Francisco 2009 – Part I of III

I just got back from a trip to QCon San Francisco 2009. A few guys at work had been to previous QCons and the con came with a pretty good recommendation. A total of six people from my company went, and two of them I didn’t expect to find there but was instead pleasantly surprised to meet up.

The official tagline for QCOn is well-explained on the infoq web page, so go there and read it. I divided the post into three parts because one long post would keep me  up all night. This way, I can spit this out and finish it tomorrow.

I0f you were wondering why I would write about my trip in such detail, well, these posts are going to serve as notes for myself so I’m just being selfish.

While @ #qcon, I attended three grueling days of sessions. I say grueling because I hit all three days and attended all time slots save one on Friday when I took a short trip to get some Dim Sum (playing hookie ROCKS). There were some AMAZING sessions and some FANTASTICALLY DULL sessions. All in all, I would highly recommend the con to anyone looking for a good place to hear about the latest developments in our field.

I was a tweet-monster on this trip. I mean srsly, a monster. In fact, I knew I was going to tweet a lot so I created a new id, nickcoding. Not to be confused with my other twitter id, NickCody. I try to be serious and clever with nickcoding whereas NickCody is stupid and immature without trying. By doing this, I seem to have inspired one of my pals to create a new id as well. In contrast to my creating a smarter account, he created a stupider one.

Here is a list of the sessions I attended. After this boring list, I’ll point out some of the highlights from my trip.

Day 1

• Keynote: Techie VC’s Talk about Trends & Opportunities by Salil Deshpande and Kevin Efrusy
• Patterns in Architecture by Joseph Yoder
• Lessons Learned from Architectural Reviews by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
• Adventures of an Agile Architect by Dan North
• Roadmap to Continuous Deployment by Nathan Dye
• Strategic Design: Avoiding Responsibility Traps by Eric Evans

Day 2

• Keynote: Data and Programs: Rethinking the Fundamentals by Don Box
• Better Architecture Management Made Easy by Alex Zitzewitz
• Programming on the Right Side of the Brain by Michael Feathers
• Software Architecture for Cloud Computing by Michael T. Nygard
• Architecting for the Cloud by Adam Wiggins
• Pragmatic F# in Action by Josh Graham and Amanda Laucher

Day 3

• Keynote: Next Generation Service Orientation: The Grid, the Cloud, and the Bus by David Chappel
• Sustainable Design for Agile Teams by Eric Evans
• M – Dynamic Language Grammar by Amanda Laucher and Don Box
• Skeptical View of Language Workbenches by Glenn Vanderburg
• Amazon S3: Architecting for Resiliency in the Face of Failures by Jason McHugh

In my next post, I’ll talk about my experience in these sessions. It will really be fun, I promise!