Arrived at Dallas TechFest 2009 this morning. Found the place just fine but it may have been a little better if there was some signage at the doors to show people where the check in desk was. I had to walk around for a while to find it. Check in was a breeze but that might be because there wasn't many people here yet or just couldn't find the desk. Hmmm.
After check in I walked around to the vendors or at least the 3 that I saw so far. There may be others, I'll look later. I went to find the room for the first event. After arriving at the room I was disappointed to see just chairs in the middle of the room. Clearly the room was big enough to utilize a classroom style seating with tables to facilitate note taking, beverages and laptops! Yes, people like taking notes with laptops, this is a techfest, go figure... (Think NoFluff)
I started to get setup in the conference room got my laptop out and started to connect to the internet. Wait! What is the code? WTF No free internet access! Ok let me get my CC out and buy some. OK... Looking... Looking... WTF No place to purchase it on the site that I can see. I can't fully ding Dallas Techfest for this since Westin has a crappy site but next year lets hope for a location like No Fluff (Wait my Power cord just got kicked out by someone tripping over it. Now what was I saying? Oh ya.. ) I think that every tech conference should measure itself to the No Fluff style of setup. It works, it's efficient, and they don't charge for the internet. Ok, conf #1 is about to start.
First presentation complete on closures. From the examples it looks like a lot less code that is less complex visually. I think that I'll wait for the final proposal and it gets accepted into the core Java before I really start to investigate using this in any production work. Either that or when I work with Groovy.
Next I attended the TDD talk by Ben Rady. I saw a simular talk last year at JavaMUG and attended TDD talks from Neal Ford. Ben's talk was much more code example focused. I would love to see more of a persistence level TDD example at some point but it is a good discussion about TDD and why we all should be writing tests. Even if we don't write the tests first we need to be at least writing them. Tests create the confidence that your code works and other changes, enhancements or refactors do not affect the code under test control. I think that key to starting on this especially with a existing project is to just take pieces like Ben and Neal also mentioned, and refactor the code so some can be tested. Then repeat as necessary until you have effective code coverage.
After purchasing own lunch at Westin Grill. (Houston Techfest, and Dallas BigDesign Conf both provided box lunches for less conf cost, Hmmm) I headed back to the conf rooms. I joined Ben Rady for the 2nd part of his presentation on testing. This one was Continuous Testing using Infinitest. I have been using Infinitest since the last time that I saw this presentation at JavaMUG.org. Basically the same presentation but very effective. This really shows WHY we need to test and the benefits of continuous testing and how that affects the quality of code.
I attended Craig Walls' talk about what is new in Spring 3.0. Great talk as always Craig and I can't wait to start working with Spring 3 and try out some of the new features. It looks cool. Before attending this talk I was a little worried about the MVC changes and how that will affect legacy Spring code but per Craig it sounds like it will be a good change. I'm looking forward to using some of the new @Cookie, @RequestHeader annotations also.
Next I went to the Maven 2 talk from Ryan Breidenbach. Fabulous job Ryan. I attending the same talk at No Fluff a few weeks ago and it had most of the same content. This talk was so much better. Better speaker, maybe? Whatever the deal is I got a lot more out of this presentation than I did at No Fluff. (In fact that No Fluff session was the only session that I rated very poor)
All things considered this was a good conference and I would attend next year. I'm still a little confused over the whole pricing structure. First I heard that it was one price, then they gave out discounts, then they raised the price, then a different discount. Next year I just hope that everything is posted up front where we know when the early bird discount expires, when the discounts for user groups expires, etc. Also next year I hope they don't use the Westin Stonebriar. Nice place but it did not have enough parking and I hate the seating style. Rows of chairs for a tech conference? Who thought of that! Why not classroom style with thin long tables so we could take notes on a table, put our laptops on a table rather then holding them for the entire day. Think ergonomic! If anyone has any questions about how to put on a great conference they should attend a No Fluff event! We don't have to have the full buffet but a box lunch would be nice. Also don't forget the WIRELESS access!
I know that a lot of hard work went into this and I don't want to take away from any of that. They did a great job expecially with the speakers.
So what is next hmmmm... Spring One?
Testing from new web host
3 years ago
1 comment:
Thanks for the feedback - I'm really glad you enjoyed the conference. it was fun to organize, and I'm really pleased that we had such a great turnout.
To address some of your comments:
Internet: I wish we could have provided free internet, but the pricing structure for 400+ people just didn't fit with the budget we had. Even at a discount of $8 per person, that would have added another $3200 to the expense.
Lunch: We also wanted to serve lunch, but the Westin didn't allow us to bring food in, and the cost for their lunch was $44 per person (that's an additional $17,600 in expenses). We were able to negotiate a price of $20 per person, but we still thought that was too much to add to the expense of a conference we would have rather held for free.
Seating: Thanks for the feedback too on the classroom style vs. stadium style. We went back and forth on this and ultimately decided that since the .NET rooms were going to be pretty packed and needed stadium-style seating, we just did them all that way to make it as simple as possible. We'll look to address this next year and provide a better "classroom" style experience.
Cheers!
Chris Koenig
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