So QCon London is fast approaching, starting with 2 days of tutorials on the 8th and 9th of March, then the 3 day conference from 10th-12th. This will be my first time at QCon and I’m really looking forward to it. Having never been to many conferences in the past, the level of expectation I have is solely based on the StackOverflow DevDay in London last October. That was a great day with some very interesting (and humorous) talks, so I’m expecting even better things from QCon as it’s reputation precedes it!
I’ve been keeping an eye on the schedule as it has evolved over the past few months and am starting to wish I could split myself into a number of mini-me’s to fan out to a number of the tracks. Also because it would allow me to maximise the collection of freebies….after all, isn’t that what conferences are all about - the free stuff? Guaranteed to turn even the most restrained people into kleptomaniacs. It’s all about the free pens.
At the moment, I think I’m pretty much decided on what tracks to attend for the Wednesday and Thursday; still swaying on Friday :
Wednesday: Architectures you’ve always wondered about
Thursday: AlphaGeeks on .NET
Friday: SOA 2010 or Browser as a Platform
Performance and scalability has been the flavour of 2010 so far for me, spending a lot of time thinking about how to scale up in the world of .NET and SQL Server. So I’m particular interested in talks like “Scaling applications: Complexity, Performance, Maintainability” - keen to open my eyes to the likes of Rhino Service Bus, NHibernate and Windsor.
If you’re going to QCon, what are you looking forward to? Or have you been before and got any tips for a newbie? Feel free to drop me an email.