I was able to attend the Stackoverflow Devdays conference in Austin today and came away with a positive impression.
This was, surprisingly, my first software conference and so I have nothing else to compare it to. However, I did learn a few things, had some laughs, and would do it again.
In one sentence, I’ll try to recap the various presentations during the event:
- Joel gave a keynote presentation on the tradeoff between Simple Software vs. Power (featureful) software and that only user focused features should be considered to achieve the best of both worlds.
- Eric Jones demonstrated Python’s elegance by way of this 21 loc Python spell checker written by Google Director of Research Peter Norvig.
- Jonathan Johnson of appcubby.com built a simple iPhone application to demonstrate how that worked.
- Joel demonstrated the new Fogbugz 7 along with a new hosted solution named Kiln which integrates mercurial, code reviews, and Fogbugz.
- Peter Mourfield walked through a “nerd dinner like” example of what ASP.NET MVC can do for you.
- Jonathan Sharp, of outwestmedia.com, walked us through a wicked tutorial on the wonders of jQuery… oh, and he has a horse.
- After lunch, we watched a trailer of the fogcreek training series which covers how Fogcreek writes software.
- Damien “dude, where’s my car” Katz gave probably the most attention getting presentation on CouchDB. Seriously, put this project on your radar.
- Finally, Jason Cohen, of Austin owned Smartbear software, taught us a lot about peer code review secrets while keeping us laughing. Make no mistake, he wasn’t pitching his companies product!
We covered a lot of ground for a 1 day conference but I liked the breadth of topics.
Last, I want to thank the sponsors, Calacanis style:
- Smartbear Software
- Codero
- BuildASign.com