QCon London, 2 Weeks and Counting...

In less than 2 weeks, I'm going to be heading up the interview track at QCon London. It'll be my first time in the UK, so I'm looking forwarding to visiting. I'm also looking forward to it because, once the conference starts, the planning is mostly complete! From speakers to scheduling and equipment logistics, there's definitely a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure a successful conference track. It's all worth it though, and I find these conferences to be a very interesting and rich learning experience.

This year, I have the privilege to interview 7 outstanding people about some very interesting technologies, such as (in alphabetical order by last name):

• Jeff Barr - We'll discuss Amazon services such as EC2, S3, and SimpleDB. This is of particular interest to me because we've just finished implementing an EC2-based website for a customer (Jamloop.com)
• Christophe Coenraets - We'll discuss Adobe's brand-new Flex 3.0, AIR 1.0, the shift towards RIAs in the marketplace, and Adobe's open source strategy
• Dan Farino - We'll discuss the architecture of MySpace, the challenges of scaling the site, and MySpace's experiences with scaling a .Net-based website
• Neal Gafter - We'll discuss Java 7, the oft-discussed "next language", static/dynamic/mixed typing and closures
• Erich Gamma - We'll discuss the Eclipse ecosystem, the Jazz project, the Eclipse release process, design patterns, and the impact of jUnit
• Rod Johnson - We'll discuss Spring Integration, the TaskTop partnership, the Covalent acquisition, and the open source business model
• Alexandru Popescu - We'll discuss the InfoQ architecture, technologies used, and how InfoQ addressed some of the problems that they encountered (such as the shift to the new video infrastructure)

In addition to those listed above, several other InfoQ editors will be conducting interviews with other conference speakers. To see the entire list, take a look at the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday schedules. Also please note that there are two additional interviews on Thursday, during the BOF sessions. Those interviews are Neal Gafter at 18:45 and Linda Rising at 20:00.

For those that would prefer a Google Calendar with this information, here's one:

For those of you that are in attendance at QCon, I would strongly encourage you to attend these interviews if you have any questions. We will be taking questions from those who are watching, so this may well be your best chance to get a good answer to those questions that have been floating around in your mind. For those who are unable to attend, the videos will be posted online at InfoQ throughout the coming months.