qCon Restores My Faith In Tech Conferences

I'm back at my cash money day gig after spending yesterday at qCon London, where I gave a presentation on RESTful approaches to financial data integration. Before I went, I have to say that I was a little down on the conference thing in general, having attended (and spoken at) way too many that were either just Vendor Drivel ("Got a problem? Buy my solution!") [1], or Preaching To The Converted ("Technology/Methodology X is great! Aren't we all so clever for noticing it?"). qCon has largely restored my faith that it's possible to put together an excellent technical conference that's relevant for the way we communicate about technical subjects today.

First of all, having individual tracks have their own coordinators helps with this quite a bit. In my case, the Architectures in Financial Services track was organized by Alexis Richardson and Cleve Gibbon, who did a fantastic job of putting together a quite varied collection of speakers, none of whom was a pure Vendor Shill. In fact, there was only one speaker who even had something to sell you at all, and he actually presented something that was quite interesting from a technology and business perspective, and could have been done with alternate vendor products as well, so it wasn't just a pure sales pitch. We had the CTO of a spread betting company, the head technologists of 3 of the AMQP implementations (RabbitMQ, OpenAMQ, and qPid/Red Hat MRG), some ranting geek, and the head of a statistical arbitrage hedge fund (who codes his own management interfaces in Curses).

Looking at the other tracks, they had a similar quality of curation. The conference had the inventors of Clojure, the Lift Web Framework, Erlang; practitioners/architects at brand-name companies galore; luminaries like Steve Vinoski, Tony Hoare [2], and Cameron Purdy. This concentration of insane brilliance with very few vendors giving thinly disguised pitches is one of the things that makes conferences relevant from a presentation-quality perspective.

My frustration and disassociation largely came from the rise of the internet programming community. Blogs, RSS readers, StackOverflow, Proggit, all of these disintermediated conference organizers from the programming public. Why have to get on a plane three times a year and watch the same old shills (of products and consulting services of course) bore the heck out of you for hours at a time just for the couple of nuggets of useful conversation that you couldn't get any other way? You can just follow the people you're interested in online and skip out all of that.

So how do I think qCon has become relevant? What is it doing well?

• They understand presenters. Want to speak at JavaOne? Last time I tried, you have to have your slides completely ready months in advance. No last minute changes allowed. Given the velocity at which development is changing, that means that by the time of the show, everything you might want to talk about is irrelevant. At qCon, nobody asks for your slides in advance. Rather, they know that we're all doing last-minute revisions until 2 minutes before you go live. So they just walk up with a USB key while you're still onstage and grab them right there and then.
• It's not single focused. While I think that there are places for single-focus conferences (whether on programming languages, methodologies, or specific technologies), it's hard. Getting people together requires at least a couple of days of content, and how much content can you put together on one single subject without it getting boring and repetitious (and thus Preaching to the Converted, as the only person who wants to hear 3 days worth of "Scrum/Perforce/Ruby Is Great" is someone who wants their worldview validated by others).
• It has the right number of tracks.By having about 5 things going on, you always have a choice of something interesting to see, but you're not so spoiled for choice that you get frustrated that you can't go to half the things you find interesting.
• They grab practitioners. This is extraordinary, because there are a lot of people that showed up to give presentations who aren't prolific bloggers or writers or speakers. You get to have their experience where they have maybe one or two things they can/want to talk about a year. That gives you remarkably deep access to senior technologists that you wouldn't otherwise get access to as part of the online development conversation (the guys who show up and present at every single conference you can't seem to get to shut up sometimes)
• Free Beer. Seriously, while I expect that tonight there will be many people down t' pub, hosting a free beer night got lots of side conversations going fully lubricated by alcohol. While not a ton of technical content probably got disseminated, people made contacts and generally talked about what they're doing and why.

But it's also that the attitude of the audience, and the technologies around, have also changed. Laptops were open everywhere, and people were quite openly half listening to the talks and doing other things (presenters often working on their slides). Wifi sucked but was available, and people were blogging and emailing and twittering and looking stuff up online about the content of the speeches. That's a sea change.

One of the reasons I stopped liking attending conferences was that if there was a presentation that was boring me, I didn't have ability to do anything else. Leaving was rude, and by the time laptops became widely used, it was considered rude to not pay full attention to the speaker, no matter how rubbish he was. These days it's not (I've been to a number of recent meetings with tech companies where every single attendee has a laptop open on the table and is only half paying attention; this is now normal). That changes everything, because it means that the conference is part of that larger programming community on the internet. qCon isn't an experiential event, it's a nebulous event with a nexus around those people attending in person.

That's critical: there's still value in qCon for those who don't attend. Slides are online immediately; people blog about it during and after; interviews are performed and posted to web sites; presentations are filmed and trickled out over the course of the year; interesting points from most talks are tweeted out. You can still benefit from qCon even if you don't attend, but if you do, you're just a greater part of it, as you're at the core. And that's precisely how qCon to me seemed extremely relevant in the internet communication era.

So if you think conferences suck, go to a qCon one. I'm very glad I did, and only wish I had been able to stay for the whole thing.

Footnotes
[1]: Guilty! When I worked at M7, I was the designated thinly-disguised marketing shill at SDEast and BorCon.
[2]: Turing Award Winner in da hizzy! Also, best quote evar: "QuickSort was only the second algorithm I tried to write." Wow.

Slides From qCon London 2009 Presentation

Just finished my talk at qCon London 2009, and I wanted to get the slides up here on the blog ASAP. Will have a bigger writeup on the qCon experience (unfortunately due to cash money job constraints only going to be here today) forthcoming, but I like to get the slides up right away.

Slides for all of you are here:

RESTful Approaches to Financial Systems Integration

View more presentations from KirkWylie.

They're also available on the qCon schedule page already.

Even My Mom Rejected Vista

When I moved across the pond 5 years ago, I gave my (then 3-year-old) personal computer to my mom. Since then it's pretty much ceased to function properly: it's running Windows 2000 Professional, has never had a virus scanner installed, one of the two 10k RPM Ultra-160 SCSI drives (yes, it was one of my Database Development workstations) is dead, and generically it's full of death. It needs to die. I finally convinced my mom that she should move to a Mac. After all, as near as I can tell, my mom uses her computer for:

• Pictures of Grandchildren. Viewing them, printing them, saving them, forwarding them.
• Pictures of Zoo Animals. Ditto above.
• Surfing the Web. I'm not quite sure what she does, but it's clearly not going to Snopes, as the final major use is
• Forwarding Chain Emails.

In the run-up to the new Mac Minis finally appearing, when I started to get tired of Steve rejecting all non-laptop customers, I asked her, "if they don't come out with a new Mac Mini, I'm afraid I might have to recommend that you just get a cheap Dell, as your current computer simply isn't going to last." Her response? "No. If I get a new PC I'll have to get Vista."

Yes, the Vista bashing is old hat in the tech community, but this is my 65-year-old mother (who doesn't have the foggiest idea what in the world I actually do in technology at this point, except that I've managed to convince her that no matter how much I worked on technology for structuring CDOs, the current financial meltdown is most certainly not my fault). She has no idea anything about UAC, or driver woes, or file copies never terminating, or any of that. All she knows is "Vista Sucks, Avoid It Like The Plague."

What makes the Microsoft position more tenable is that they've made it abundantly clear that they know that it's a PR disaster (do I actually think it's a terrible operating system? I wouldn't know from first-hand experience to be honest, as I've never run it. I doubt it, to be honest. I think it's probably better than XP in a number of areas, but it's different, without sufficient obvious advantages). They've EOLed XP, even though they know their customers want it. Heck, they'll charge corporate customers extra to install the old OS that they want and that works just fine for them. How insane is that?

Can you imagine any firm other than Microsoft saying "We know that nobody wants this product; moreover, we have no legal or regulatory reason forcing us to sell the new productin favor of the old product that people actually do want; however, we have never admitted an error ever, and so we will not admit that Vista was an error." I mean, this is the company that probably still has people who thought Microsoft Bob was a good idea! Their solution here, in addition to charging you extra for a downgrade, is to run ads essentially telling you "Vista isn't as bad as you think it is." That's not the point. By that point it had the stench of failure to it to the point that My Mom thinks she would rather buy an ancient, overpriced Mac Mini to avoid it.

The move to Windows 7 is a good one: fix what's wrong, break with the past, do it fast. It might be the next version of Windows I'm forced professionally to use.

Because when even my mom says an operating system sucks, you know it has teh suck.

And my mom is the proud owner of her new Mac Mini, which the nice gents at the local Apple Store even populated with her Mozilla 1.5 email and addresses (yes, I said it was ancient).

Meta-Note: Switched to Disqus

As a meta-note, I've switched over the comment system for new posts to Disqus, now that Blogger has finally allowed it without barfing when I update my template. I'll be monitoring for a period to make sure that things aren't too wacky, but please let me know (kirk -at- kirkwylie -dot- com) if you find any problems.

And now back to our regularly scheduled ranting...

UPDATE: The switchover, it does nothing. T0rx is able to do it no problem with effectively the same template, and I can't. Bloody hell. I'm getting the hell off Blogger as soon as I don't have the lurgy.

Index Raises Another Round

TechCrunch reports: Index raises an EUR350MM round. TechCrunch UK continues, and is a better analysis from a European perspective.

As I've said before, perfect time to be investing Euros in London-based firms.

Dell, Your Pricing Policies Suck

I'm in the market for a Netbook, and I live in the UK. But as a USAmerican, who cannot for the life of me retrain my fingers to use the UK keyboard layout, I want a US keyboard for it or else there's no point.

I start thinking "Hey, that Samsung NC10 is pretty good, why not get that?" Except no US keyboard available, not even as a replacement part through a service centre. And I really don't want to ship one from Amazon.com.

So I also hear really good things about the Dell Mini 9, and it's dirt cheap, and runs that Linux thing all the kids keep going on about. And as a USAmerican company, surely they can accomodate me? No.

Dell will not sell you a Dell Mini 9 with a US keyboard in the UK, and they will not ship one from USAmerica to a foreign address.

Ahhh, but it turns out that if you know to order the magical part U061H, you can get a replacement keyboard module in US-International layout (which is technically a replacement part for the UK-only Vostro A90), and it's field replaceable. Sounds great. So I figure I'll buy the netbook, and also buy the keyboard module and match them up myself.

Call Dell UK and ask for that part? GBP 49 + VAT + Shipping.

Call Dell US and as for the identical part? USD 14.99 + Shipping. But they won't ship outside the US.

And this is a replacement part for a UK-only machine! They want 25% of the original value of the whole netbook for just the keyboard module.

I mean, I have an out: have my parents buy it and ship it over to me, and I'll still save about GBP 30 from going with the official import route, but Dell, your pricing policies suck and have no earthly justification of any form. I mean, Sterling may be the European Peso, but last time I checked it was still better than GBP 1 == USD 0.306.

Gettin' My GeekSpace On

I believe that every geek needs some space to, well, geek out sometimes. For me, that involves:

• Doing Open Source coding;
• Playing around with technologies before I'm getting paid cash money for them;
• Coding on the systems for the animal conservation charity of which I'm a trustee;[1]
• Working on any startup ideas that I might have brewing at the moment.[2]

When I was living in Silicon Valley, I always had this type of space. Whether it was a bedroom that I used only for coding and sleeping (and other things requiring a bed), or a guest bedroom I appropriated for a pure geek room, I always had somewhere that I could have a nonstop whir of fans from multiple workstations, lots of monitors [3], and lots and lots of mess without any complaints from the significant other. And then I moved to London and it all ended.

When I first moved here I lived in no fewer than 4 homes in my first year[4]; none of them allowed me to set up a Geek Space. Flats here are small (you pay roughly what you do in San Francisco or Manhattan, but the flat you get for the money is drastically smaller than what you get in San Francisco for the same price [5]). Finally after 2 years we moved into a house where I finally had my Geek Room, but we only lived there for 9 months before we moved into our current home, a minimalist loft.

While a minimalist loft suits us aesthetically, it doesn't combine very well with a geek-friendly workspace. Convincing the other half that the Pawson-esque interior can support a desk covered in cables, books, scraps of paper, and at least 3 monitors (or one huge one) is a pretty hard sell. So I did what most London-based geeks do: I got a powerful laptop.

It's a compelling sell. Get a MacBook Pro and you have a system running Unix with a pretty darn beefy processor and bus. Plus, you can take it out of your cupboard when you want to do work, and put it back when you're done. Surely that's going to be good for coding and supreme geek activities, and support your small-flat aesthetic requriements? Uhm, no. When you're used to a crazy keyboard, a crazy trackball, and at least two 1600x1200 displays, restricting yourself to what you can do on a laptop is virtually impossible to do effectively. Plus, Mac key bindings are bloody retarded for coding (seriously? Steve thinks home/end should mean different things to the rest of the world? Take your mock-turtleneck and shove it, yo). You find yourself thinking to yourself constantly "I could do this faster on a real computer," and that distracts you.

Plus, I'm easily distracted. If I have a room all to myself, I can properly geek it out and ignore the distractions of being at home. If I'm in a corner of the general space I might be more social, but I'm constantly going to be distracted by being at home, and looking to just chill out on the sofa. Not conducive to being geeky.

This didn't impact me quite so much until recently: my previous two cash-money gigs were extremely laid back, and had no problems with my doing my own stuff on down-time as long as I got the job done. In addition, my jobs required me to constantly evaluate new technologies for addition to the company's recommended technology base, meaning I was being paid to play with emerging technologies. Current cash money gig? Not so much.

So when I found out that there was a desk up for rent in a shared office in Shoreditch, I went to meet the guys, and I signed up. I'll have a desk in a room with James Governor, James Stewart, and Matt Patterson. Admittedly they're there mostly during the days, and I'll mostly be there evenings (on the way home) and weekends, but I'm pretty excited about the chance to have a suitable GeekSpace where I can prevent my geek-self from intruding on my home life, and be able to geek out with others (again, previous jobs had more people conducive to doing this during business hours than the current gig). All this for less than I spend on beer in a month.

I think this probably a pretty good model that other geeks in suitably expensive domiciles might want to follow:

• Find a cheap room reasonably close to where you work, or in between where you work and where you live;
• Rent the room and network access;
• Split the costs between the lot of you.

You get the best of all worlds: a space you can geek out, and no home-life strife. What's not to like?[6]

I'll be posting more about this as I get myself fully embedded, and as I learn some good rules on combining an off-site GeekSpace with an at-home life devoid of real workstations. Consider this an experiment in work-life balance for the geek set.

Footnotes

[1]: You'd be shocked at the level of paperwork and data management even a simple zoo would need, and how little of that appears to be general enough that you can pay someone to take the burden off your hands. I'm shocked at how charities a little bigger than we are, without a software engineer available, are able to comply with the requirements.
[2]: Of course officially I have none of these. None at all. Nothing to see here; move along, move along.
[3]: Ever tried to make sure sure an Ikea desk isn't going to collapse under 2 21" CRTs? Can be quite nerve-wracking...
[4]: My personal life got very complicated when I moved here. If you don't know me personally, that's all I'm gonna say; if you do know me, you know what happened.
[5]: 750 square foot for a 2br being a luxury? Seriously? London's that crowded? I don't think so. It's more that the planning system is so insane here that once you get the chance to build anything you cram in as many units as you can in the space. For a place that isn't a concrete canyon/jungle like Manhattan, it's a bit ridiculous, really.
[6]: This isn't relevant to the Silicon Valley set of course. What self respecting Silicon Valley geek doesn't have the ability to setup a Geek Space at home? None.