Lance McNearney
lance@mcnearney.net

I attended Stack Overflow DevDays 2009 in San Francisco this last October. Here is my review of the conference (in chronological order over the course of the day):

• No breakfast - There weren't any large banners or friendly greeters for the conference but we found it. The website and e-mail we received for the conference indicated there would be breakfast but all we found was coffee. We had to run down the street and visit a Safeway to grab something to eat.

• Keynote by Joel - The videos and his speech were very good and exciting. Joel is a great speaker and seems like a great leader. His general message of "elegant design" was spot on although it's been done before. My fellow developer (Tyler Allen) commented that he saw a similar presentation with the exact same design screen shot examples when we went to Adobe MAX a few weeks earlier. Still great though.

• Python with Mark Harrison - I've been really interested in Python and Mark showed a single screen of code that implemented a spell checker. I thought it pretty obfuscated and hard to understand by itself but luckily he expanded each line of code into a more readable format and I think everyone was able to follow along. Personally, I felt the code was kind of a brute force approach to spell checking but if it worked why use something more complicated? It just goes to show how fast computers have become where we're able to generate such huge sets of data in memory and throw them away. I enjoyed his presentation and wish he would have had time for more questions.

• IPhone with Rory Blyth - This was an eye opening presentation. We're a Windows shop but have been looking forward to moving to the Apple platform and dabbling in IPhone applications. Honestly, after seeing what it took to create such a simple application in XCode we were kind of shocked. Simple things like hooking up button click events required dragging and dropping lines from the code file to the controls and then adding further code on the back end to actually implement the events. It may be that we're just spoiled with Visual Studio but the development process seemed pretty horrible and un-intuitive (very non-Apple like). After the XCode example he launched MonoTouch (which we didn't even know existed) and created the same application with a lot less hassle. Very cool.

• Lunch - The lunch and snacks for the event were pretty good. They had a large variety of Boudin lunches (sourdough sandwiches), cookies, fruit, soft drinks, etc. We sat out in the hall and sat next to Jeff Atwood and Mark Harrison while they were eating lunch. It was interesting to hear Jeff talk about some caching issues with SQL Server queries that I've run into in the past.

• FogBugz with Joel - I missed this presentation because I was outside getting a demo of the FogBugz software. It's a nice system and we've been attempting to work it into our workflow since visiting the conference.

• ASP.Net MVC with Scott Hanselman - Scott was a fun presenter. He seemed to poke fun at himself and Microsoft a lot. He acknowledged a lot of the problems and missing features of their MVC framework and while I don't think he converted anyone away from Django or Ruby on Rails he may have pointed out that their MVC framework is a good step up from the standard ASP.Net forms model.

• Stack Overflow with Jeff Atwood - I wish his presentation was longer and that he would have answered more questions. Everyone was really interested in the Stack Overflow application (obviously) and more time should have been given to covering it.

• Qt with Daniel Rocha - I'm a long time reader of Slashdot and have heard a lot about Qt and Trolltech in the past. It seems like a major engineering feat to create a cross platform UI framework like Qt. Unfortunately, Nokia seems to have bought up the product and shoehorned it into creating mobile applications. The sample application he was showing off looked horrible compared to current IPhone or Android applications. I think half of the people in the room excused themselves and walked out because the presentation felt so much like an outdated sales pitch and just didn't feel relevant to the current market. Thumbs down.

• Android with James Yum - I thought James did okay considering he was only given 2 days notice to come up with his presentation. His examples seemed to highlight more of the problem of developing multi-threaded applications than Android applications but I think everyone got the idea. I see now why Apple locks down the IPhone platform so much. I did feel a little shortchanged by this presentation in general. James couldn't answer a lot of questions asked by the audience and seemed kind of inexperienced. I was glad to see that Google hires mortal developers and not just development gods with 30 years of experience and triple doctorates on their resume. It gives me hope that maybe one day I could apply there.

• jQuery with Yehuda Katz - I was kind of disappointed in this presentation because it felt like an introduction to jQuery. I was hoping to learn some advanced techniques. About the only thing I gained from it was that the 1.4 release would let me reference the $(this) object for each element without having to do a .each() loop. Oh well, still a good primer for anyone without jQuery experience and a nice presentation.

Overall, I thought the conference went very well and showcased a good number of technologies. I look forward to attending it again next year!

This review was originally posted on meta.stackoverflow.com back in November of 2009.