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Here's a very brief summary of how Stack Overflow DevDays 2011 will go down:

  1. It'll be two days long.

  2. It'll be sometime in September or October.

  3. There will be FOUR independent, separate events to choose from in different cities: London, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Sydney.

  4. There will be a single track, so you never have to worry about choosing between two equally cool topics.

When we did DevDays 2009, the idea was to do some intensive, one hour programming tutorials on the kinds of topics that we thought a lot of programmers really wanted to learn, but didn't have a chance yet to use at work. Two years ago, the topics we tried to cover were jQuery, Python, iPhone development, ASP.NET MVC, Google App Engine, etc.

This year, we've got two days, so there'll be time for even more sessions. We'll also have time for deeper, more big-picture talks in between the tutorials.

What topics would you like to learn about at DevDays 2011? One topic per answer, please, and vote up all the ones you like.

UPDATE (April 21st) Thanks for all the feedback, ideas, and votes so far. Keep it coming! We are working on nailing down dates and venues. Soon, we will line up committees for each city responsible for lining up speakers and fleshing out the schedule: they'll use this input as guidance to set up an awesome program in each of the four venues.

In the meantime if you have other questions about DevDays or other discussion, please ask it as a separate question tagged devdays-2011, don't just leave a random fly-by comment in the comments.

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  • 5
    No chance of a central location (like New Orleans)?
    – Cade Roux
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 21:06
  • 3
    I was definitely holding out for another Canadian stop, but I guess the guys down under luck in this time.
    – mistagrooves
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 21:42
  • 4
    Just one thing - will it be available as Live webcast ? I'm outside US or AU :(
    – Shekhar_Pro
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 21:58
  • 3
    And one more thing will Jon Skeet and his Tony the Pony will be there this time too.... (I miss tony a lot ;)
    – Shekhar_Pro
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 22:01
  • 14
    if only there were a q&a site, where you could ask questions, and get answers... and people could, you know, vote on those answers, and... OH WAIT! THERE IS! Plz 2 ask all follow-up q's using the ASK QUESTION button and then typing. kthx
    – Joel Spolsky
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 22:32
  • 4
    Can you guys push it later? I'm kind of getting married in September ;-) Unless I can convince my future wife to honeymoon at DevDays ... (just kidding!!!)
    – codes_occasionally
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 1:09
  • 3
    Any chance of some open space sessions at these events? The best parts of the last conference were the discussions between sessions and afterwards. The topics at the DC event were hit and miss. If you want info/advice on running these talk to the PyCon folks like Bruce Eckel as they run them really well, compared to those I've seen at .NET events.
    – Brian Lyttle
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 3:27
  • 3
    Why not just create a question for each venue and allow session submissions in the answers. Highest voted submissions get in. Simple as.
    – PhilPursglove
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 10:43
  • 2
    @PhilPursglove I'm not sure I'd bother going to the conference if that was the case. I can understand why DVCS is leading below, but I don't think that it necessarily makes for the best presentation or conference content. It would need to cover material above and beyond the likes of the hg init tutorial.
    – Brian Lyttle
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 14:43
  • 1
    @BrianLy "The topics at the DC event were hit and miss" This is likely the biggest reason they are 1) holding fewer events and 2) forming committees to determine the topics and speakers.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented May 4, 2011 at 13:44
  • 1
    @adam - the reason there are fewer events is because of the tremendous amount of time and energy it takes to do a venue/event. They are delegating the work and looking for an easier way to find/determine topics. It has nothing to do with "hit and miss"
    – tim
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 15:23
  • @Tim That makes sense.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 17:18
  • 2
    @Cade Are you based in the US by any chance? A central location based on London, US East Coast, US West Coast, and Australia would be near the Earth's core. It might present practical difficulties.
    – MarkJ
    Commented May 19, 2011 at 14:16
  • Still trying to learn this site. Can anyone explain how this question is on topic for this site?
    – user136460
    Commented Aug 24, 2011 at 22:46

74 Answers 74

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Google App Engine

More please....

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Microsoft Surface

Developing multi-touch enabled applications for Microsoft Surface.

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Spring

New features in 3.1, best practices, Spring Data, Spring AOP vs AspectJ, etc.

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Impact of touch screen and small hand-held computers on programming

  1. What IDE do I need for programming on my driod / assembling and deploying?
  2. How to use my hand-held to develop more stuff on it
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Massive, Dapper, and MicroORMs

Breakout topic, since Rob Conery probably can't speak at every event. Probably.

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FPGA and how it is being used in low-latency trading systems.

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  • If you said programming techniques and strategies for low latency domains (e.g. trading systems) I would vote up - but not as it stands.
    – tim
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 14:49
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NoSQL, Sass, SproutCore, and Node.js.

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    should be separate answers...
    – An̲̳̳drew
    Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 18:59
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GWT and WindowBuilder

Google Web Toolkit can be used with or without Google's App Engine. It allows you to create the client-code in java that it underneath compiled into javascript.

WindowBuilder is a user interface builder tool that closely integrates with GWT, but also with desktop application level UI libraries like Swing and SWT.

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Less software

It would be interesting to see how developers would give up their lust on building a solution with the most sophisticated and new and cool stack around, and build it with the pure minimum that gets the job done.

Less layers, less of a concept, less code*, less CPU, less technology. This would probably look like the 20% that do the most of the work without the 80% of bells and whistles.

Less code doesn't necessary means using shorter method/variable names or minification of some sort, it is closer to the "less of a concept" thing.

The idea is to challenge us to think a little in the opposite direction of the inertia to Web 3.0, clouds and stuff like that.

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CQRS and Event Sourcing

See CQRS and Event Sourcing for more details.

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Writing applications that can make, recieve and interact with phone calls using Python, C#, etc

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Ruby on Rails Best Practices

The framework has been out in the wild for a long time. Best practices that top developers in the field follow to make their apps.

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Qt and QML

Anyone using this? http://qt.nokia.com/products/

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Object Normalization

"Everybody" knows about database normalization, but how about Object Normalization?

I've studied it for years, have some insights, and have decided that it's better to share them than take them to the grave. I can demonstrate much of the theory in a practical way by refactoring a really awful PHP script live. Sounds thrilling, I know, but it can give one a SOLID GRASP of object-oriented principles in a unifying framework - and the theory/practice has some surprisingly powerful implications.

It's probably too late to propose this for 2011. But what the heck. Dev Days DC is still months away!

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