QCon 2013 is over!

March 6th to March 8th saw the 7th annual QCon in London. Like every year, QCon was held at the Queen Elizabeth II Hall next door to Westminster Abbey – a great venue. This year there were even more delegates than in previous years, and key sponsors included Oracle, Skype, 10gen, AppDynamics, Azul Systems, basho, Erlang Solutions, jFrog, Neo4j, Soundcloud, splunk, Windows Azure and many more. With over 110 speakers and 22 different tracks, I was very happy to meet our authors who spent some time at the O’Reilly booth:

• Maximiliano Firtman – it was Maximiliano’s second visit to QCon. He is the author of the forthcoming Programming the Mobile Web, 2nd Edition (due in April) and jQuery Mobile: Up and Running.
• Ian Robinson, Jim Webber and Savas Parastatidis – the 3 authors of REST in Practice, 1st Edition, together for the first time in a long time. Ian and Jim have also written Graph Databases due in June but already available here as an e-book.
• Russ Miles, author of some O’Reilly classics and allegedly writing a new book, Programming Spring, due in November.
• Damian Conway – most of you know Damian as a prominent member of the Perl community, author and presenter. I was lucky enough to attend his “Instantly Better Presentations” keynote. Damian captures his audience very quickly and holds their interest 100%: not only does he educate them but entertains them for 50 minutes. In this talk, he explores seven simple and effective techniques to help us achieve great presentations. It all sounds so easy when Damian is presenting, but one should not forget that he spends hours and hours preparing one talk.
• Francesco Cesarini who wrote Erlang Programming. I believe he is now working on another book on Erlang.

Unfortunately, I was unable to meet Arun Gupta (Java EE 6 Pocket Guide) and Mike Amundsen (Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node) who were also speakers. I am sure we will meet somewhere in the future.

Delegates came from all over the world, as far as Australia, Mexico etc. One of my little games is to look at the name badges or listen to the accent and try to figure out where the person come from. I usually get it wrong but I suppose that’s the reason I keep trying.

Off to 33rd Degree Conference in Warsaw!