Devoxx 2010 – Part 2
So this is the second part of my experiences with Devoxx 2010. I’ll still stick to not writing about the talks in detail but telling my thoughts as a “first time visitor”.
So day three to five at Devoxx were “Conference” days which have – in opposite to the University-Talks Florian and I mentioned earlier – much shorter talks. This had the trade-off I mentioned before: You have many switches of topics between the talks which actually made it sometimes kind of hard to even remember at the evening what I saw in the morning. But what I have to admit is, that even if there were more talks a day the quality of them was excellent. There were so many brilliant Speakers (Josh Bloch, Neil Ford and Matt Reible just to mention very few of them) and almost all talks were as well interesting and entertaining.
So we had a lot of fun listening and I personally can say I am full (actually more than full) of new ideas and inspiration about what to do next and how to adopt or use things that were talked about at Synyx.
Another thing that I recognized is, that many many of the ideas, tools, frameworks etc that were showed at the different talks are already in production at Synyx, which confirms us and shows that we’re on the right road. But of course there is still a lot of work to do, a lot of code to write and a lot of and ways to improve ourselves. Well, this was one of the reasons why we’ve been visiting Devoxx anyway.
A downside of the Conference days was, that there were about 5 times as much visitors than in the first two days, which made the rooms and hall really crowded and you had to wait often (getting in/out of room or going to the restrooms). During some really popular talks people (including us ;-)) had to sit at stairs or at the floor to be able listening to them.
I think what could be improved for the next time are the “flows” of people during the breaks. Maybe only allow people leaving the rooms at the lower exits and enter them at the upper ones or manage them another smart way. And maybe they could have some overflow-rooms that can be dynamically used if a room gets too crowded.
To sum things up it was a great time we had at Devoxx 2010 and I’d love to come back again since this conference is really the best – at least the best I’ve been so far. Keep up the good work, we really enjoyed it!
Flo
Another improvement might be to invest not just in coffe shirts but in the coffee itself :)
Next time I will take a thermos flask with me and take some coffee from the city to the conference.