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A Taxonomy of IT Conferences
By admin | September 9, 2008
JAOO is under a month away, so it’s time to check the schedule and think about what to see. It should be, anyways, but we all know that it won’t happen until 5 minutes before the first session. However, when the time comes, there will be some difficult decisions to be made – whether to see something new and obscure, or take a safe bet on a known speaker, or maybe take a look at some interesting new technology.
Generally, the choice comes down to one of these:
Powertalker
Go to one of Kevlin Henney’s sessions, and you know what I’m talking about. These are the sessions where you are never bored, and while the session is running, you think to yourself: I understand this, I like it, and I’m going to do it at home. 5 minutes after the session, most of it is forgotten, except the general feeling of being a better person.
Career talk
These are the talks which are not necessarily the most interesting, but you go to them because it makes sense(tm). The subject might be the same as the one you’re working on yourself at the moment, so as a career-move, it’s a good thing. After all, who attends WS-anything talks for any reason but this?
Lottery talk
This is the kind of talk where you either win big or loose everything. The session title is often somewhat obscure or non-specific, and there’s probably an even chance that you’ll end up with some Oracle sales guy and a new and completely surprising technology. Of course, you often avoid these sessions based on the title, and you’ll be forever tired of yourself for going to that MS talk instead.
Over the fence
Sometimes, just sometimes, you might curious about what’s happening in the other camp. Maybe you’re like me and don’t much like anything Microsoft, so you stay away from it and live a quiet life, knowing to yourself that you’ve made the right choice, and that the others are basically morons. There comes a time, however, when the number of conference sessions about the other side gets too large to ignore, and this is the crucial time. You think to yourself, “maybe I should go and see if they’ve learned anything from us”. So you go, and unfortunately, some of your beliefs are shattered: delegates turn out to actually be nice, PowerShell might actually do something good, Linq isn’t that bad an idea after all. Of course, you don’t tell anybody, and when you get home, you just act as if it never happened.
Tech surprise
You live a quiet life as a normal developer, and generally feel that you’ve got the handle of most technologies. Until you go to some random session where you are introduced to the technology you can’t live without, and it’s a mystery that you’ve done it so far. I learned about JMX, Script.aculo.us, and a whole lot of other technologies like this. The important aspect here is that the technology and the tools are so easy to work with that you can essentially apply them everywhere with very little effort.
My typical conference is a good mix of all of the above. However, by far the best conferences are when there’s been a tech surprise or two – this is not always the case, but it’s always worth hoping for.
September 9th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] I’ve attended. Because it’s somewhat JAOO related, the result has been posted at the JAOO blog. A followup is probably on the way… Of course, if you’ve not yet decided to go to JAOO, [...]