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If you attended DevDays in Toronto, please post your thoughts about it here. Links to blogs etc are also welcome.
Dev Days Toronto was excellent value for money and time. I enjoyed listening to people who are funny and don't take themselves so seriously, that they can't make fun of themselves. Thanks Joel, SmartBear, and Codero.
Well Done
Free copies of "Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review" and "Painless Project Management with FogBugz". These will be read and maybe passed on to others.
The countdown timer kept everyone on time and the twitter feed kept them entertained. The stage set-up with screen, two lecterns, front monitor and timer was efficient.
The Fog Creek videos were hilarious. I didn't know about the training videos. What a great place to work!
Joel's openning keynote was funny and thought-provoking. I promise to ask fewer questions on my forms!
The Python talk convinced me that it's worth looking at. (I wish there were more hours in the day.)
I'd seen the FogBugz features on-line, but Joel's was much more persuasive. He showed the project from both the developer's and the manager's view.
The salads and sandwiches at lunch were delicious. Much better than the morning muffins.
JQuery is back on my high priority list as something I have to try. The talk reminded me that I have at least two minor projects where it would be useful.
Greg Wilson's talk was excellent. The first thing I did when I got home was to give his contact info to a colleague with a volumous bug problem. I liked Greg's Father's quote: "A week of hard work can sometimes save you an hour of thought".
Meta-programming (mis-titled as ruby) was interesting, and raised some good points. The most useful for me was the difference between ugly problems and drunk problems.
It was impressive when the different speakers reinforced each other's messages, through the use of shared graphics and common code examples.
Areas for Improvement
The muffins were disappointing and it took a long time to enter the theatre. While waiting, it would have been fun to have an activity that would have encouraged meeting other people.
I was looking forward to ASP.net MVC. Barry and Joey did a good job, but they weren't as good as the ruby on rails video I had seen previously. I was disappointed when we didn't get to hear the accordian.
Considering the number of iphones in the audience, something on mobile development would have been appropriate.
My thoughts:
Keynote: good start.
ASP.NET MVC: This is supposed to be a conference for programmers who are just interested in all aspects of programming, and the presenter was trying to draw divisional lines between technologies. I don't think that was in the spirit of the conference, and maybe that's why the stuff that was supposed to be funny didn't come across as funny. The technical demo was interesting, and just what I needed as an introduction to it. PeeTimes was funny.
Python: Very Good. I can see why the language is getting so much interest. Kind of looks like it has a lot of the power of Perl without looking like line noise on an old modem.
FogBugz: Kind of a advertisement I had to pay to see, but at the same time it also sponsored the cost of the event, and the cost was certainly reasonable, so ok. It didn't bore me.
jQuery: Very Good. One minor point I would make is that it just needed a very quick intro to the DOM for people who might not be web developers (I know there aren't many left).
Greg Wilson: Probably the highlight of the conference. I hope he succeeds in his mission to apply statistical evidence to software development. Again, there was a very diverse audience in terms of technologies at the conference, including Java programmers. Java is highly represented in SO. I'm not sure why he considered it necessary to pick on them, especially when he didn't offer us any evidence to back it up. Maybe that was supposed to be irony.
Ruby: Not sure I learned anything about Ruby. I kind of get the idea about changing the computer language to suit your purpose and making it more expressive for what you want to accomplish instead of just shoehorning your application into the available tools. Perhaps if it was advertised as being about "meta linguistic programming" instead of Ruby, then it would have setup our expectations a bit better.
I had great expectations for this day. I didn't attend expecting that I would learn how to program in within a 50 minute presentation. I can do that on my own time from the comfort of my home. I came expecting to be inspired. I wanted to see things that I don't normally see in my day-to-day work. I wanted to leave all fired up and ready to make a difference in the world (ok, at least in MY world :) ). Did it deliver? Kind of.
Joel's keynote hit the mark. It's something that all (most) developers should struggle with. How do we make something so incredibly difficult and complex appear effortless and intuitive? Elegant user interface design is something that is lacking far too many applications.
From there things went downhill. Not that the presentations/presenters were bad or didn't know their stuff. I just wasn't inspired. For example, I felt that the JQuery talk could have demonstrated how jQuery can create the worlds most intuitive UI (as an aside, Joel's demo where he added sub tasks completely via the keyboard should be how every interface works. He mentioned that they tried to make it as simple as using notepad).
Greg Wilson saved the day (slides). His talk has been and will be covered by numerous people so I won't add too much except to say that he opened my eyes, challenged and inspired me. Thank you Greg.
Reg Braithwaite also gave a great talk. I heard grumblings that there was little in the way of ruby. Which (in my opinion) was his point. Who cares about the language? Languages will come and languages will go. As developers we need to learn how to solve problems, programming languages are just a means to achieve that. If all you know how to use is a hammer then every problem will look like a nail. I wish I would have known a bit more about Reg before the talk. I've followed some of his projects (from a distance) in the past without realizing that he was involved. He is brilliant.
In the end it was a great day. I'll be back next year and I'll be bringing the rest of my team with.
I posted my thoughts about Dev Days Toronto at In Review: Stack Overflow DevDays Toronto; anyone know where we'll find the slides and so forth from the day?
The slides for Revised.revised(Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)): http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/72157622647242360/
I would echo the comments on Geoffrey Wiseman's blog, except for a couple of things.
I came all the way from Rochester NY and stayed in a hotel nearby because my father, who lives in Oshawa, sold his house and the closing date was the day before yesterday. Yeah, he didn't consider my conference schedule in his moving plans, dammit. I hope to come back next year, but I'll need to find cheaper accommodation.
In Summary
What it comes down to over-all is that when you've got a bunch of different talks on a bunch of different topics to a diverse crowd, you don't go there expecting to like all of them. This isn't like the $1000 conferences where you pick the subject matter and level from a wide palette of choices - there couldn't be an "ASP.NET MVC for Unix dudes" and a "ASP.NET MVC for expert ASP.NET programmers who haven't gotten around to checking out MVC yet" because there was only one talk going on at once. So the fact that I didn't get much out of a couple of talks was expected by me, and doesn't mean I didn't think it was a fantastic day. And it doesn't mean the presenters failed, they just didn't aim their talk precisely at what I needed.
The slides for the ASP.NET MVC presentation are here.
Greg Wilson's slides are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367
DevDays was definitely well worth the time and money I invested in it. Kudos to Joel, Carsonified and everyone involved in the logistics for being able to pull off the conference at such a low price point. I am in the crowd of people who self paid for the ticket (though my employer gave me the day off to attend), so the fact the event was only $99 was a big reason behind me being able to attend.
I appologize in advance if I end up repeating the thoughts of others that posted before me
Looking forward to being able to attend next year! I definitely recommend anyone who didn't go this year to check it out next year.
I'm not a web developer and I came with an open mind regarding ASP.NET MVC, but if you compare Joel's (well-rehearsed, in-a-VM) FogBugzz 7 demo with the ASP demo, what a contrast. Doing live demos can be extremely difficult (I have done so myself) but it dragged on for way too long. Maybe with a simpler project there would have been a better chance of bringing interest.
I appreciate the effort, but between Rails and Django (which have their own issues), what does ASP.NET MVC bring to the table that makes it worth building on a Microsoft stack? That's the question I wanted answered.
Excellent ... can you do these a couple of times a year?
The Greg Wilson presentation was worth the price of the conference. His sexism slam at the beginning sobered the audience and was an eye opener.
The FogBugz ad would have been a bad idea if Joel wasn't a great speaker and/or the application wasn't so deeply important to developers. Not a criticism but you need to be careful that the sponsor presentation slot is only occupied by a good speaker with a product important to developers.
The .Net/MVC talk was irksome. The hippie jokes went flat after the first couple. Too much time was spent on the tutorial, only a couple of the steps should have been done live to show how easy the framework was to use, the rest should have been code samples and higher level discussion. The talk should have been good because the framework was interesting and both Barry and Joey are good speakers. For the record, I like .Net and would have liked to have seen the rest of the slide deck ...
The jQuery presenter was a bit of an awkward speaker but the material was great. Work on those presentation skills Ralph! And don't use red on black as a highlight in future ;-)
I liked the meta programming talk but my lack of ruby experience made some things hard to follow, especially at the end of the day.
I liked the venue but the screen was small if you were in the balcony. This certainly didn't help the MVC presentation ...
Hi, I blogged about it! I loved it and I loved the trip to Toronto (from Montreal). Thanks for the warm welcome.
As I said, I blogged about it and I'm currently writing about the last 2 talks of the conference. The first 5 (incl. opening keynote) are available: http://blog.mikecouturier.com/search/label/devdays
Joel is a genius... A visionary, funny, a people person, a programmer, a communicator and an entrepreneur. Seriously, it's hard to find that many qualities in a single person. A must see in a conference.
For 99$, a steal
Mike
Prof. Wilson's talk, The Bits of Evidence, got the most applause from the audience. It was a great idea to allocate one slot to an "academic" speaker so that we all could step back from products, languages, and frameworks and look at the big picture. Greg Wilson showed numerous examples of how the software field is not up to the same standards of scientific proof as evidence-based medicine and how things are changing.
The Python talk (by Jordan Baker) was also very engaging. The speaker could have easily spent one hour going over the syntax of various language statements, but instead, fortunately, he chose one problem that is not trivial, but can be solved effectively using the unique powers of Python. I am referring, of course, to the spelling-correction problem ("did you mean...?") and Norvig's algorithm. The speaker then built the algorithm from ground up, line-by-line. That was a great introduction to Python.
I am sure Reginald Braithwaite's talk on metalinguistic programming got some people in the audience to rethink their thinking about thinking about thinking about programming. The entire presentation was written in Ruby syntax, which was very very cool.
"Frameworks talks" (on ASP.NET MVC and jQuery) were not as exciting, but contained a lot of useful information and the speakers definitely knew their topics.
Joel's keynote was quite entertaining: many examples of how to simplify a software product by removing decisions that annoy users, the acknowledgement that complex, feature-rich products make more money, the dilemma between simplicity and the need to make money, and the attempt to solve it by picking "good" features over "bad" ones.
And finally, Joel also talked about Fog Creek and its products during the conference. To me that sounded more like information (StackOverflow Jobs, FogBugz's code review features, etc. etc.) and less like a sales pitch.
I loved it. Mostly I will echo the sentiments above. I'm one of the "my job didn't pay for this, if it had been more than $99 it might not have worked out thank god for this I never get to go to conferences" types. Seriously, loved it - fantastic job. The venue was perfect (who cares about wifi, I have an iPhone), meals were better than expected and just good enough to come home and say "you know, the food was good!" without being overkill. The content was amazing.
On the ASP.NET MVC "live coding example"...
I'm very sure I'm not cool enough to have done a better job, first of all. This disclaimer aside, it would have been nice if:
All in all, it might have been the concept that was too ambitious for an audience that varied on a screen that small. The intent, subject and speakers were interesting.
Greg Wilson's talk was definitely the highlight of the event. I really wish that it was recorded because I'd love to show it to some colleagues. He touched on a lot of the issues we run into in my current working environment (and I'm sure many others' as well). I'm simply not going to do the presentation any justice when I attempt to explain it. It's the only talk that during which I was frantically taking notes. Very natural presenter, well done.
The Python talk was interesting, a lot of information and a very intriguing sample program covered in less than hour.
I, too, came from Rochester, NY and would likely come again next year. Not sure if I would stay at the Rogers Centre/Renaissance Toronto Hotel again, but I am definitely going back to the Mill Street Brewery!
Python talk slides have been posted.
I see all of the slides coming up, and the audio for Greg's talk. It would be great if next year these were all filmed and posted after the fact. I'd love to be able to send the keynote and Greg's talks to a few of my co-workers.
It would also help create buzz for next year's events.
