If you attended DevDays in London, please post your thoughts about it here. Links to blogs etc are also welcome.
Just got back home, so off the top of my head...
The Good
Jeff and Joel: Even though I'd caught some of their talks on the podcast on the train in they both came across as the very polished, very natural speakers they both are. Joel always impresses me so the bar was higher but Jeff especially came across as thoughtful and well spoken. Though I cannot believe a man of Jeff's age hasn't been to Europe before. Americans - wtf :)
Jon Skeet (Humanity: Epic Fail): damn him, he can even talk the talk in person.
Paul Biggar (How not to design a scripting language): The student talk (though calling a PhD candidate a student feels disingenuous). I've never looked into compiler theory in even passing interest and I found this both insightful and intriguing enough for me to want to go find a book on the same in the near future, though apparently not the dragon book. Apparently the answer to the talk isn't just "PHP" as well - who knew?
Christian Heilmann (Yahoo! Developer Tools): Really savvy presenter again but frankly the YUI tools I know (and respect) aren't of any real interest to me given jQuery and my own libraries, but when he got to the YQL demo it blew my mind. Searching for all the twitters matching X and translating them to language Y? This stuff looks so powerful.
The Bad
The fogbugz presentation: yes it's a very slick product, yes it looks awesome, and if I had any purchasing clout at my company maybe it would be relevant. I resent being compelled to watch a sales pitch to matter how well presented, but not nearly as much as I resent paying for it. I just don't get who the audience was for this.
Phil Nash (iPhone): Bad is the wrong word really. Very solid presentation indeed, but what I got from it was concrete evidence that objective-C is completely nuts and to be avoided at all costs. Crossing fingers monotouch is worth getting on board with.
Pekka Kosonen (Qt): Same again, really quite entertaining presentation (and refreshingly honest view of Nokia dev support) but I came away from it without really grasping why I should care about Qt.
Remy Sharp (jQuery): Probably the best technical demonstration but totally the wrong audience and the wrong level imho. When over half the audience has used jQuery before you're just wasting half the audience's time - it's not like jQuery has esoteric corners to illuminate or anything.
The Ugly
Michael Sparks (Python): I don't want to dwell on this too much but, "train wreck". Definitely the low point, no real business presenting and only succeeded in reinforcing the idea that Python really is just the monstrous write-only progeny of Perl. Which is a shame really because I still don't really believe that. Sorry Michael.
Reto Meir (Android): Very dry indeed, couldn't help feel that Java looks incredibly crufty and dated and I'm thinking that google made a tactical error by association.
Catering: usual for London, i.e. massively overpriced, poor quality, little selection. I understand it ran out as well which beggar's belief. I assume everyone who's ever been to London before just went out to find a pret or a pub or something but the impression made on first-time traveller's must have been awful. Future recommendation: just don't bother.
Overall I probably got my 85 quid out of it (definitely more effective value than FOWA say) but it would take significant change for me to bother again. I don't want to be sold anything by anybody and I do want to learn about new and exciting things coming down the line (the stated goal) but that isn't jquery or python, that's erlang or F# or haskell.
Finally I was disappointed that there was no organised social event around this - SO is a huge community and a lot of us would probably like to put faces to the names etc. Starting with something as simple as putting gravatars on namebadges would have been a good idea, and y'know a scheduled after-session in the bar (wait, there was no bar...). We were never going to organise ourselves, but a little help from the organisers would have been easy enough wouldn't it?
*Addendum: when I got home I found an envelope full of (now redundant) trilogy stickers and a signed thank you note from Jeff for my participation (even though a recalc left me on page 3 these days). I gotta say the human touch there made my day, I'll be keeping that letter I think. This is how you build community.*
I don't think it would be useful/fair for me to post thoughts on other speakers, although I will say I particularly enjoyed Paul Biggar's speech on scripting, and I had a generally fabulous time. Thoughts on the general day etc:
I was pleased with how my own talk went, although I could really do with a preview of which slide is coming next. I think I fouled up in at least three places due to that. Tony went down well - thanks to Eric and TheTXI for that suggestion. I still don't understand why subscribing to the time zone news blog got quite as many laughs as it did, but I'll take everything I get. It's good to have the talk on video to work out how to improve. Thanks to everyone who said nice things afterwards.
Suggestion to those who had to lean against walls or sit on the floor: there are often seats on the front row.
I'll use a different banding, although it's all by-the-by:
Useful
Christian Heilmman (Yahoo! Developer Tools) - just showed some damn cool stuff that nobody has bothered to look at because it's Yahoo! and yet all of Yahoo! has been able to accelerate so quickly (and quietly) because of it. To me it brought home the 20% catching-up time that we all need - don't roll your own GIS analysis tool, use something Yahoo! or Google have developed and don't worry about it because you are /never/ going to even blip onto their bandwidth. This reminded me that much of the big-power on the web is pretty cool and friendly, which is at times an uncomfortable feeling.
Paul Biggar (How not to design a scripting language) - right to the bones, what the hell is going on, guaranteed to piss off virtually all PHP developers and c++ developers alike by saying that it basically doesn't make much difference what you use, but if you were aiming for perfection then figure out a convergence...
Jon Skeet & Tony the Pony - we all knew what he was saying but it still felt like news, and that's the mark of a great communicator (a trait that was brought up in many talks)
Pekka Kosonen (Qt) - I admired Pekka's openness and thought, particularly having seeing the car-crash of Objective-C, that there was something sensible going on in there. I think it's dangerous that everyone is assuming they should develop for iPhone when in fact there's massively more audience (+money) in the big mobile providers.
Less useful
Phil Nash (iPhone) - Oh My. Phil's presentation was top-notch but to see Objective-C code in the flesh is like watching the London sewer pipe close up. Please, everyone figure out a bridge very quickly. When so much of current talk in programming is about readability, surely we should stick a knife in.
Jeff & Joel - OK, just too satiated with podcasts and blogposts that there wasn't a great deal new there, but still did a fantastic job in organising and envisioning the whole day.
Frustrating
What I would've liked to see:
For me, the highlights were the iPhone talk, the JQuery talk, Joel's keynote and Jeff Atwood's StackOverflow talk.
I didn't expect to get much out of the iPhone talk, but I became hooked on the discussion of the syntax of Objective-C. It may not make sense to anyone from a C# / Java / C++ background, and it certainly hasn't made any sense to me before, but the presenter's explanation of its history as a language made all the pieces drop into place.
For me, not having used it, Remy Sharp's jQuery talk was informative. I was surprised by how many people in the audience had used it, but given its power it will definitely be on my shortlist should the need arise.
Joel's keynote was witty and hit the mark. He is an engaging speaker. I felt bad for Michael Sparks who followed him with a talk showcasing Python's expressiveness as Joel was definitely a tough act to follow.
Jeff's comment about starting his blog to be able to talk to other developers struck a chord.
Unfortunately I had to leave early, which meant that I missed Paul Biggar's talk on how not to design a scripting language. Judging by some of the other reviews it looks like I missed a good one.
When the DevDays were originally announced I took note of their intention to have presentations that were taster sessions for their subjects. I skipped some of the presentations that I wasn't interested in and had some interesting chats instead. You didn't have to go to all of them.
That's why I find it strange that there are so many disappointed with the level of the talks. I found the jQuery talk good, but above my head in some cases. If you know and use jQuery why did you stay for the talk? If you wanted a more in-depth presentation, there are other conferences for that sort of thing. It would have been strange to have a talk on the esoteric corners of jQuery in amongst presentations on the basics of Python, and Android development.
Objective-C seems to have taken a kicking. @VoteApp didn't accept it as a language.
On to the plus points:
and negatives:
I'll certainly consider going again.
Interesting comments. To those that thought the presentation sucked - my apologies. Contrary to some comments, I did do a lot of prep for that talk, but it's an odd approach, and not one I've taken in the past. Based on reactions, it's not one I'm ever likely to take again.
I've given a bunch of presentations in the past on Kamaelia, concurrency, and also on topics like how to manage creativity in an R&D project, as well as on open source in general, but this was the first time I'd really gone down the route of no slides, which was an explicit request.
Specifically, the brief for the talk was essentially "can you talk about this code example, introducing python as you go, assume you're talking to experience developers, but they may not be familiar with specific aspects of python, and please do it without using any slides". (this is a paraphrase)
So I took that brief and went with it, and having seen a variety of responses varying from "please go away and do not darken my door again", through to "That was fantastic, thank you", I've come to the conclusion that if this talk style was a food that it would marmite.
I think there is a place for that sort of thing, but when you've got 900 people captive in a room, having 400 people upset is not a great thing. Marmite is all well and good, but if there's that many people, aiming for a talk with a similar appeal level as chocolate or coffee is probably a better aim.
I think if I was to redo that talk, I'd probably want to discuss in greater detail picking out something more generally relevant, and representative, even if not "all code, no slides". I'd also aim for a better balance - with more useful slides. (If you look at previous presentations, I tend to think extremely heavily about what I put in them to assist what I'm saying rather replace what I'm saying)
When I gave a tutorial at Europython this year by contrast, I produced slides, but still did much of the tutorial in terms of a walkthrough. In a way, I think the key difference is that having actual slides gives an audience more cues that actually the talk is going somewhere specific.
This is all 20:20 hindsight of course. Before giving the talk I liked the code example, thought it interesting and useful, and a good idea. Even right before the talk, Joel checked with me that I was going to do what I did saying it had been a really popular approach elsewhere.
From a pragmatic perspective, it's worth mentioning that having the audio drop out as it did really doesn't help . I could hear it doing it, and it really throws you as a speaker, and from experience of sitting through talks with bad audio levels, I know it's awful to listen to as well. There wasn't really any excuse for this incidentally. I arrived at the venue shortly after 8 in the morning, when a technical run through was happening. I wasn't mic'd up however until 9:30 - near the end of Joel's talk. That could have been, and should have been sorted before people started coming in IMO.
As they say, you live and learn. If anyone has any specific suggestions for improvement, I'd welcome them either below or via email ( sparks dot m at gmail dot com ).
Incidentally, I only found out about this page by chance. No one seems to have bothered to let the speakers know these links exist.
Mind you, Stack Overflow didn't pay speakers expenses either (and no, neither did my employer), so when I found that many of the other talks were all marketing oriented I came to the conclusion that I'd been used and decided to head home mid-afternoon in order to get home before midnight. (I don't live anywhere near London, and due to timing in the day had to come down the night before)
I'm glad some people got something from the day, and once again, my apologies to those who hated my talk for following the brief I'd been asked to follow (I did after all choose to follow that brief).
Whilst that may come over a little b* * *y, that's not my intent - unless we're honest about where things go wrong things don't improve. As I say above, if anyone has any more feedback, please get in touch. To me it was a fail due to the amount of negative feedback, something I've not had in any previous presentations, so I have something to learn. Please don't assume anyone's told me what you're thinking, since I've seen both extremes - I'd like to know where you perceived things went well and where you think they went badly.
But on the upside, at least some people liked it - I'll try and do better next time. (if there is a next time)
You live and learn I guess.
Personally in order of enjoyment it was Paul Biggar, Joel, Michael Sparks, Jon Skeet and Jeff. I’d admit that Paul Biggar stood out in my mind because what he was talking about is quite relevant to what I’m currently working on, but I thought that he was an interesting speaker who made some good points.
I’m still mentally processing the other talks, so I’ll have to get back on them. Although Remy Sharp’s jQuery, Pekka Kosonen’s Qt talk and Christian Heilmann presentation of the current offerings of yahoo developer tools have made me very much aware I do need to set aside some time in the near future and sit down and look at them a bit more closely.
Overall I was very impressed and willing to come to the next one. The giving away of Painless Project Management with Fogbugz was nice touch and I’ll be having a good flick through that later in the week too. :)
In no particular order:
<cough>Fog-bugz</cough>) were fine by me - how else are you going to meet the $99 price point? But, to summarise:
An unequivocal success.
Upon leaving, I was actually a bit disappointed, but perhaps I just had high expectations. I did get a lot out of it and was worth the price.
Highlights
Phil Nash (iPhone): Great, well-prepared presentation. This is what Dev Days should be about. Writing iPhone apps is all the rage and I didn't have a clue about it or Objective-C when I walked in. I came away with an understanding of both.
Jon Skeet (Humanity: Epic Fail): Probably the most entertaining though not very technical. It was fun to see Jon speak.
Christian Heilmann (Yahoo! Developer Tools): An unexpected hit. I wasn't really interested in Yahoo! Developer Tools, but the presentation was well done and the YQL demo was absolutely amazing. I was glad I didn't leave early.
Also good
Paul Biggar (How not to design a scripting language): Another pleasant surprise. I am not interested in designing a scripting language, but it was an interesting discussion looking at features of various languages and had general appeal.
Jeff and Joel: I wish I hadn't listened to the podcast first, but overall good talks. As usual the points are right on and certainly relevant. I didn't mind the FogBugz presenation -- I've read about it enough on his blog posts, it was actually good to see a demo. After all it's their conference so it is expected to have demos of FugBugz and StackExchange.
Remy Sharp (jQuery): Another well done presentation. While many people many know jQuery, it was new to me and certainly one of the stronger presentations.
Room For Improvement
Other Presentations: Due to a combination of subject matter, presentation style, or preparation I didn't get a lot out of the remaining presentations. Though I didn't expect all of the topics to be the most relevant, a good, well-prepared presenter would go a long way.
Helloapp: Good idea; poor execution. I like the idea of meeting other people with similar interests, but this didn't do it. I don't use twitter, but happen to have an account. It literally took me hours to try and figure out how to get myself on the map because of some twitter settings that aren't visible on the mobile version of their site. It shouldn't be so hard. And it didn't really help me find people because the map was cleared every session and there was no listing outside of that. And the tags on my profile didn't show up in the tag cloud.
Venue and Catering: There wasn't enough room for all the people. At the first break it took 5 minutes to get out of the room and at least 10 minutes in the queue for a drink. Similar for lunch, but there was no food left when I got to the front.
Screen: It was blurry which made it difficult to read code-heavy presentations. That probably had huge impact on my appreciation of, for example, the Python presentation.
Like Jon, I'm not in a position to say too much about the other sessions, but overall I thought it was a great day. I certainly agree that the catering could have been better. I didn't sit in any one chair long enough to know how bad they were, but everyone else seemed to be complaining about them. I tend to agree with all the points Jon made, and want to thank Joel, Jeff and Carsonified for putting the conferences on and for all the effort involved.
I met some great people there too, some I knew, some I knew of, and others were new to me. That's a big part of what these conferences are all about.
It seems my own presentation was a little controversial. This is probably not the place for me to go too much into that, but I've just posted to my blog about it, so feel free to drop by there :-)
My own thoughts from yesterday's London #devdays event http://www.horsesizepills.com
My £0.02, if you're still interested this far down the list :-)
http://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2009/10/stack-overflow-dev-days-london.html
As a response to a few of the "jQuery - wrong level" type answers - I've used it for a while (although I certainly don't consider myself an expert), and while I know how the selectors and things work, I still managed to pick up a few tips that will fix a couple of issues I've had - things like .live to keep adding events to added elements, and using .getJSON to handle the whole JSON/JSONP and associated issues when calling web services.
Overall, I found the conference to be interesting an useful - there will be highs and lows with everything: take the Andriod presentation - all that time spent on the Maps application - I've done Google Maps on the web, so I know how to create a map, add overlays, etc, yes it's good to know that if I want to build an app the skills are transferable from the web side, but there could have been something different in there (i.e. more stuff with the hardware (tilt, compass, etc)).
I've just posted my review on my blog.
I really liked it, especially Jon's talk and the Paul Biggar's "lecture" about scripting languages. I would say the worst part was the Qt bit - it didn't really convince me to develop for Nokia phones. The Python talk didn't really highlight Python's strong points, instead concentrated on concepts that are pretty much present in most modern programming languages.
As a bonus, here's a crappy G1 recording of mine of the first five minutes Jon Skeet's talk. I hope I violate the terms and conditions of the event by publishing it (I don't really care): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQDLtixGHr0 (sorry for the quality, that's all the G1 can do)
my personal high points were Jeff and Joels talks (Jeff's hit a nerve with me when the inside of the Amiga 1000 case came on screen, since a friend of mine is in the process of butchering a real live A1000 to make a Franken-miga... )
The iPhone segment was a good intro for me as i'm about to take that plunge, and the objective C was causing me a few headaches but makes sense now.
Qt was pretty relevant for me since I already use it at my current place (though phasing it out as it doesn't play too nicely when mixed with MFC) and I love the way Finns speak english. Pekkar gave nice interesting talk, and i may well consider doing some Qt mobile dev in the the future.
Jon was very entertaining and his geek t-shirt was bang on, though for me nothing new except for there being 3 CST time zones (2 in the same country!!)
I've not done any web client side stuff bar some basic html, so Remy was over my head after the first couple of slides...
I avoided the food fail by skipping out to the high street along with probably more than half the audience... (and they still ran out??? who are these catering amateurs) It sounds like McDonalds was an upgrade so I guess I dodged that particular bullet. The polish coke was funny tho.
nice to have a quick play with the nokia n900 that one of my colleagues has been harping on about for the last month and the fogbugz book was just a sweet cherry on top!
Thank you Jeff for sparing as much time as you did to chat, I'd have loved to talk a while longer, but there was a queue forming....
oh and I imagined Joel to be taller and Jeff to be shorter IRL...
The venue was easy to reach and I did not have problems with chairs. Most of the time I was sitting upstairs so the gas problem wasn't that bad. Lack of space during the breaks was annoying. Catering was a joke as mentioned many times already.
I have to say that most presentations were good or ok but I didn't get the point of the Qt presentation. Definitely did not attract me to start Qt development for Nokia devices.
Android presentation was somewhat interesting because of Java but the zooming around the screen, sound problems and slow pace made it boring.
Despite those rants I found it worth of a travel (from Edinburgh) and I'll try to make it again next time.
Photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pepez/sets/72157622685399650/
FYI the topics we coverred at altnetbeers afterwards were
Positives
Negatives
Here's my review: http://phil-booth.blogspot.com/
Finally able to write mine:
I also wrote an extensive review on my blog: http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2009/11/01/stackoverflow-devdays-in-london.aspx
The good stuff:
Michael Sparks' Python chat was the most 'consumable' code-based presentations I've been to. It was also educational and I can't want to tinker with Python again. And find a reason to add a spellchecker to my application.
The introduction video (staring Jeff, Joel, & random FogBuzz staff) was highly entertaining. Although, I don't think Pope Benedict will like it much. Seriously, funny stuff.
Joel Spolsky's "simplicity" key note was great, although he was singing to the choir for some/many of us. It was well thought out and presented. And the UK hat was fantastic.
The bad stuff:
The venue was not large enough for that many people. The queues for coffee and food could not be serviced in time. There was realistically only enough time for everyone to exit, smile at each other, and reenter the theater in the allotted break time. Worst part? Rubbing shoulders, literally, with lots of skinny people. We were all sitting in strange postures trying not to tough each other. And the bastard behind me who wore the same pair of pants he wore last night out clubbing in W1? Grrrrr....
Reto Meir's Android: The small font problem was rectified by zooming in. And, Reto not having done this zooming before, kept moving the cursor. Even he was dizzy halfway though. I was down right nauseous and spent much of that time staring at the floor breathing sslloowwllyy. Got a headache too, from which I never recovered that day.
I took a couple photos too:
Jeff Atwood at DevDays London http://lanai.dietpizza.ch/images/devdays-london-jeff-atwood.JPG Joel Spolsky at DevDays London http://lanai.dietpizza.ch/images/devdays-london.joel-spolsky.JPG
In short: worth the time and money spent (I flew from Italy). I'll probably attend next year's conference.
Good:
Bad:
I took these pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/brunorothgiesser/DevDaysLondon
I generally enjoyed the day, despite having to get up at 5:30 to travel from Cambridge (the Cambridge event having been announced well after I booked).
I will add a comment about the use of twitter. This was fine for those with the right phones and laptops, but left out those of us without. Glancing over the shoulder of the people near me the HelloApp generated map of seats was pretty sparse, which I think was a consequence of this. TBH I don't have an account on twitter, facebook or any other social media; the people I socialise with don't use it so I have no need. I feel what would have worked better was a much lower tech solution such as people writing the technologies they were interested in/working with on their sticky name tags. That way you could easily spot similarly interested individuals. Alternatively if twitter etc. are going to be an integral part of the experience, then this should be made clear before the event so that I can properly prepare.
I am a heavy user of Qt but found the Qt talk a little dissapointing. I felt it amounted to saying nokia development used to be rubbish, but now we have Qt it is great. What it didn't say was much about what Qt is good for, which for me is having the equivalent of the standard Java libraries available for C++, and code that simultaneously works on windows, linux, mac and solaris. Plus it is actually OO and sane to understand, unlike MFC.
Given how many people turned to their laptops when the talks were poor - perhaps an objective measure of a how good a talk is would be the inverse of the volume of wifi traffic.
I think Tony the Pony has come from Ikea. AU$ 6.99 :D He's a Swedish programmer...
One point not covered by the other reviewers: Horrible audio.
I was one of the (probably) very few non native English speakers in the audience. And I must say that I had an unusually hard time understanding the lectures due to the very poor audio quality.
Although I do speak and understand English fluently (as opposed to perfectly), I caught only half of the sentences pronounced by some of the speakers (especially Reto Meier (Android) and Phil Nash (iPhone), to a lesser extend Paul Biggar and Michael Sparks). Half the sentences means way less than half the presentation overall :-(
Some other speakers were way easier to understand (Jon Skeet was the best hands down).
Conclusion
Carsonified, please care more about audio. It's way more important to your international audience than a failed lunch!
