QCon San Francisco 2008 – Impressions

Last year I came back from QCon San Francisco filled with new ideas. DSLs were clearly going to rule the world so I’d better start using them any chance I got. No surprise then that I was back for more this year, hoping to find out about the hottest new bleeding edge trends. Unfortunately the first two days were slightly disappointing. I did visit some interesting cloud computing introduction talks and Kent Beck’s talks were pretty funny, but nothing really blew me away.
Luckily the last day was more like it. Here are some impressions of what’s hot and what’s not:
– Relational databases are very uncool (or “unkuu” as Kent Beck’s son would apparently put it)
– Alternative storage solutions like CouchDb, AtomServer, and Neo4J are very hot.
– Google’s BigTable and MapReduce are very influential and lots of innovative new projects are based on them.
– Everything should have a RESTful API.
There were a lot of interesting sessions on friday but the best two were definitely:
– Unshackle your Domain, a DDD session that talked about some very interesting domain modeling techniques. See Erik’s blog for more info on that session.
– AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution. These guys not only discussed a very interesting RESTful data storage solution, they were also very entertaining and their new dating site https://www.AnyoneWillDo.com/ will undoubtedly be very successful.
All in all it was very much worth it coming to San Francisco this year and hopefully I’ll be back for more inspiration next year.