My first Uberconf is over. Was it worth the 16,000 mile (26,000km) round trip and a week away from my family? It was definitely worth making the trip but now I need a holiday to get over it because I’m exhausted and next time, I’ll bring my family along for the ride!
The conference is a learning and networking feast, with a wide variety of great content delivered professionally by awesome speakers that really understand their subject matter. The Westin Westiminster hotel was also a great vanue that catered well for a conference of this size, in terms of the rooms, the delegate accommodation and the food.
Almost all of the sessions I went to were good, but if I had to pick my top three sessions it would be these:
Matthew completely blew me away with this talk. Not because of the subject matter but how he delivered it. I have never seen anyone deliver a presentation as professionally as Matthew did. I attended two of his other talks and he was just as good in both of those, even when the wifi was conspiring against him! He is definitely the Steve Jobs of the No Fluff Just Stuff crowd!
This is a subject that I knew next to nothing about before the session and I left feeling confident that I could go and implement encryption correctly and effectively afterwards. I also really enjoyed his Thinking in Git presentation which gave me lots more reasons to love Git!
I also got the chance to sit next to Matthew for dinner one evening and he is a really nice guy too. Very engaging, humble and friendly. A definite star in our industry.
Like Matthew, Tim is an excellent presenter and this talk was probably the most thought provoking of all those I attended. It was a whistlestop tour of what complexity theory is and what bearing is has on our daily lives and the software we write. It was both educational and challenging in exactly the right proportions.
He also delivered a wonderful skit after dinner one evening, called Oh, The Methods You’ll Compose, which almost got a standing ovation from the audience! It reminded me very much of Guy Steele’s and Richard Gabriel’s 50 in 50 keynote that I was fortunate enough to see live at YOW! Brisbane last year.
I wasn’t able to make any of Venkat’s other talks but I had been told that he was an excellent speaker and didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to see him. This subject wouldn’t have been top of my list of his talks, but it was the only one where I didn’t have a clash!
As it happened it was the last session of the conference and Venkat was in excellent form! He engaged the audience with some great anecdotes and was animated and jovial throughout. He clearly has a passion for all the work that he does and it was a great privilege to see him in action.
Narrowing it down to three talks was very difficult and the three I’ve picked out are the ones I enjoyed the most, but these guys also deserve special mention:
Last but not least I need to say thank you to Jay Zimmerman, Mr. No Fluff himself. I know that he was very helpful in getting me to the conference and he made a point of coming over and checking how I was getting on, obviously remembering the e-mail exchange he had with my team leader. Now I know that is just typical of his attention to detail and the reason that the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences have the reputation that they do.
The only criticisms I had from the conference (and I know other attendees had the same problems) were:
Clearly the conference couldn’t be any longer, neither the speakers or the delegates would survive! Maybe grouping the sessions so that all the beginner/introductory sessions ran concurrently, then the intermediate then the expert ones. Given everyone will be at different levels on different tracks, they could have the choice of going from beginner to expert in one track, or cut between them depending on their existing expertise level. Also grouping the workshops together might work better.
Finally, I met a lot of very talented, very passionate and very friendly people at this conference, delegates and speakers alike. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright ©Craig Aspinall 2011