Hurley's World

I spent yesterday attending a great one-day developers conference run by Joel Spolsky. This was a real treat for me, since instead of giving up a weekend day to the cause, I able to go during the work week. Besides the excuse to get away from a computer for a few hours, I'm also quite a fan of stackoverflow.com and the stackoverflow podcast.

The day started as these things often do for me, a woman helping to run registration was excited to see another woman attending the event. What really made me smile though is that she got into a competition with the guy next to her over who could find my last name first. She won through the clever use of a binary search algorithm.

Overall, I really enjoyed the relatively wide range of talks. The talks by Ned Batchelder and John Resig were of the most interest as I'm more of a dynamic language person and I do a lot of web work. The ASP.Net MVC was interesting in that I really like the separation of code MVC supports/enforces but the presentation was, perhaps, a bit too long and detailed for the audience. The iPhone presentation had a few great nuggets of information, but I'm don't really fancy myself an iPhone programmer (for now) and so my attention waned a bit there. In my opinion, the two best presentations were done by Miguel and Joel. I can't quite put my finger on why I liked Miguel's so much. He was really funny and a bit more casual, more like listening to a story than watching a conference presentation. The fact that things didn't always go right just added to the atmosphere and good fun.

While I enjoyed the conference overall, there were a few things I didn't like. First, the venue isn't top on my list. The chairs were really uncomfortable, especially for the long hours of sitting and were probably placed a bit too close together for developers. Also, there wasn't a lot of space to break out and talk if you weren't interested in a particular presentation. Beyond the venue, there was one thing that really annoyed the heck out of me. During the waning minutes of the break, the music would get cranked up and the lights would get turned off. My assumption is this was done to discourage conversation while still giving a warning period, but the music was way too loud, abruptly ending conversations with a good minute or so left, and ended up giving me a headache in the end.

The last item is a bit of a complicated subject. I feel Joel might have gone a little overboard in the video and in his keynote. While I'm an adult and have been known to use a double entendre or two or three, I definitely felt a male bias in the content. On one hand, this makes total sense as most of the audience was male and most of the jokes were pretty funny. In fact, I don't think my issue is with the jokes that he made, it's just the number of times he made them. It's a bit like family guy where they stay with the really bad/disgusting/uncomfortable joke for a few seconds too long just to make the audience a tad uncomfortable or to emphasize it. I definitely didn't feel unwelcome, but, perhaps, a bit misunderstood.

All that said, I hope that there is one again next year and kudos to Joel for organizing such an event.