For a few years now, November has been the month of QCon San Francisco for me. So far it has proven an excellent conference with lots of thought-provoking presentations and conversations. This year was no exception. Read on for my personal high- and lowlights.
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Yesterday was a very good day! After speaking at QCon the day ended with CloudCamp. An evening dedicated to everything cloud with an amazing turnout! More then 500 folks joined.

Turns out that although in general people tend to agree what a cloud is, nobody actually knows exactly what to do with it! (more...)

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Working distributed is all about handling distance. Geography, culture, methods & tools, timezones, languages are all adding to that distance. Not measured in miles but in people.

How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?

The classical route of bringing this 'gap' under control involves adding process and handovers. It actually forces you to go into a waterfall-like model and therefor widens the Gap instead of bridging it. All waste is institutionalized. Sounds like a horror to you? It does to me.
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Tags: agile distributed, distributed agile, offshoring, qcon london, schoonheim, Scrum, sutherland
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While attending QCon San Francisco, I had the particular pleasure of attending a whole track that was devoted to the area of functional programming, a topic that I have a profound interest in. After having followed the track, I'm even more convinced than before that functional programming is not confined the the academic world. I think that it will have a profound impact on our mental perspective and the way we think about programming and problem solving in the next coming years. In this blog, I will summarize the sessions I followed, provide you with a couple of thought provoking ideas that I picked up, and hopefully makes you think about your programming style.

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Tags: Functional Programming, qcon
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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 http://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.

Filed under Domain Driven Design, General, qcon | 4 Comments »