I got the opportunity to attend some of the sessions on Thursday QCon London 2010 conference.
Quite a large number of interesting tracks. It was really hard to choose which one to go to. I decide to throw in a mix of everything.
Kicked of with Christopher Reed, a colleague of mine, and his talk on different Cloud solutions out there, and also what are they good for. Chris was emphasizing the trend in the industry. A lot of companies deciding to go into cloud as if could could be a solution to all their IT problems. Chris was pointing out that it is important to make a proper decision what solution to go with as they are solving different problems and require different treat and behavior from the organization. It is impossible to get the most of the cloud and actually not get into more trouble if you don’t accommodate the fact that you are in different environment now. I liked how Chris was dividing cloud solutions into areas based on Processing Speed needed and Data Sensitivity where Processing Speed means how fast you wont your computation to be done and how complex they. Data Sensitivity meant the amount and data importance, for example crucial amount of financial transactions versus widely available weather information served by a web site.
Second talk I was at was from another colleague of mine that actually I never had the opportunity to hear speaking live, Rebecca Parson. Rebecca was talking about the ways that people not skilled in the domain can come out with some really great solutions. She encouraged diversity and cooperation in a teams that could lead to better solutions to any kind of problems.
After Rebecca’s session and a lunch break I went into a presentation by my former colleague, Dan North. I find Dan one of the best entertaining technical speakers there. His fascination about the ways the human brain learns makes his talks always very informative and fun.
Dan was talking about the way human brain tends to see patterns, generalize and then complexify solution as a result. Very often there is no common functionality and there is no emerging patter.
I liked one of the quotes he used in his presentation:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.”
–Jamie Zawinski, 1997
Fishbowl discussion was last session. The topic was about the Future of Software development. It appears that there is emerging trend in the industry to follow the simplicity and go back to a roots of software development. Simple design and good algorithms over frameworks and bloated architecture. This trend appears to follow hardware development and new presence of mobile devices on a market.
Overall very interesting day. Pity I couldn’t make to all the sessions as they were all interesting 🙂 Hope my colleagues who were at different presentations could share their views and notes if possible.
Greg
Greg Gigon's wEbLOG 