Lights... Camera... Action!
I was at QCon London a few weeks ago, and once again I had a fantastic time. I'm always impressed by both the quality and diversity of the speakers at this conference: Banking, Architectures, Future programming languages, Agile, DSLs, and the list goes on.
I once again attended QCon as one of the people stage-managing the show. This time my job involved coordinating all 16 interviews and conducting 7 of them myself. It was quite a bit of effort - we had two cameras this time, and we opened up the interviews to conference attendees so that they could also ask questions of the person being interviewed. The new format was a smashing success - many very good questions were asked, and it really helped to increase the quality of the interviews. When those interviews start hitting the website, I would definitely recommend watching them!
The first person that I interviewed on Wednesday morning was Erich Gamma, who also gave the keynote that morning. We discussed many things including the founding of JUnit, design patterns, whether the strict application of design patterns is a code smell, how patterns are discovered, the Eclipse software development process, and the Eclipse ecosystem. We also taked a bit about the Jazz project, and I learned that it will eventually be released by IBM under the Rational name.
The next person that I talked to was Jeff Barr, who was at the conference to discuss Amazon's Web Services initiatives. We talked about many of the services that Amazon offers such as EC2 and S3, competing offerings which have begun to emerge from rivals such as Microsoft, why Amazon has been given such a free hand by organizations such as Sun, Microsoft and IBM, globalization of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and what was learned from the recent S3 outage. I also learned that there are apparently many large enterprises using the S3/EC2 infrastructure, but most of them won't admit to it or act as references.
The final person that I talked to on Wednesday was Alexandru Popescu, the chief architect of InfoQ.com. We did a walkthrough of the InfoQ architecture, and also discussed the new video architecture for InfoQ, which involves Amazon S3 and EC2. Another topic of discussion was InfoQ's use of DWR, and how it has helped to enable some of the features of the InfoQ site. Finally, we walked through the lessons learned and what would be changed if the project were to start from scratch.
On Thursday, I sat in on a couple of excellent interviews, one with Mark Little, one with Linda Rising and one with Ted Neward. In the first, Mark gave some very good answers to very good questions, and expressed a strong hope that the WS-* and REST camps could "kiss and make up" because a religious/format war isn't good for anyone. In the second, Ted Neward was very funny at times while discussing the topic of monads (Haskell) versus message-passing (Erlang) in functional programming languages, and there was one point where I thought he was going to throw the interviewer across the room (in jest, of course). Linda also had some excellent answers, and had a very interesting analogy of development practices in relation to chimpanzee versus bonobo community structure -- you really don't want to miss it. I also acted as the cameraman for the QCon Live video, in which we wandered around the conference and interviewed random attendees.
After that, it was time for me to conduct two more interviews. The first one was with Rod Johnson, who is always an entertaining speaker and interviewee. The interview covered many topics: the Covalent acquisition, the Spring Portfolio release train, Spring 3, the Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL acquisitions, and the upcoming Spring Tooling release. At the conclusion of this interview, I ushered all of the audience members out the door, and we recorded an April Fools joke which announced that SpringSource was being acquired by Microsoft. My thanks again go out to Rod for agreeing to participate in that. It was a lot of fun, and I was very gratified to read some of the reactions.
The last interview of the day was with Neal Gafter, and it took place during the BOF sessions which also took place on Thursday evening. We talked about many aspects of Java, including a stroll through the closures debate. Java 7, optional typing systems, and Google's proposed language enhancements for Java 7 were also discussed. After this interview was completed, I joined the InfoQ BOF, where we discussed things such as downloadable content for InfoQ and offering podcasts of some interviews.
Friday began with an interview with Christophe Coenraets, who was at the conference to discuss Adobe's RIA offerings. We talked about many of the recent products released by Adobe such as AIR, Flex 3, Flex Builder and BlazeDS. We also talked about the challenges of integrating RIAs with the browser controls such as Back and Forward, and ways of ensuring that RIAs are as visible to search engines as traditional web applications are. Another area of discussion that I found interesting was the current move towards open source at Adobe, and how that would continue in the future.
After that, I sat in on a couple of other interviews including Joe Armstrong and Simon Peyton-Jones. Both of these speakers are very entertaining, and they were also both very passionate about their respective areas of expertise. Joe sometimes seemed to be on springs, and would bounce out of his chair and up to the whiteboard to draw out a point. Simon also liked to gesture madly with his hands when describing something, and their enthusiasm was infectious.
The final interview of the day (and the conference) was with Dan Farino of MySpace. There was a lot of discussion of the challenges of maintaining a site of that size including the challenges of detecting a problem amongst a large server farm, how to isolate a failure to a given machine or cluster, and how to repair faults once they are detected. We also talked about MySpace's use of the .Net Framework for their website, and why they have elected to go that route as opposed to PHP, Python or Java.
After the final interview cameras were collected, lights were taken down, tapes were packed away and the conference was over. However, I believe that this new interview format was successful enough that we'll be repeating it at QCon San Francisco in November of this year... With any luck, I'll be there to help out again!
