Another Great QCon

Just getting ready to fly home from QCon San Francisco. Not surprisingly, it was another great conference, and the organizers told me that attendance was up about 30% over last year. Having a well organized and well executed conference with a large number of great speakers tends to have that effect.

Jim Webber put together and ran the REST track, and it was one of the best tracks I’ve ever been a part of. Mark Nottingham is extremely knowledgeable on the REST and HTTP fronts, so he gave a very informative talk on HTTP and the work of the HTTPbis group. Ian Robinson and Stu Charlton both spoke on using REST in the enterprise (it’s coming, like it or not). Leonard Richardson talked about how to judge the quality of RESTful services, but I missed most of his talk because I went out to stretch my legs and couldn’t get back in because the room was so packed! I spoke about my work with REST, Erlang, and Yaws. You can get all the slide sets for this track from the QCon site.

Got to meet a few people in person for the first time, such as Leonard, and also Tim Bray (who asked great questions during my talk, thanks Tim), and Michael Nygard, who is as bright and articulate in person as he is in his amazingly wonderful book (if you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and put it on your holiday wish list). I also briefly met Dave Pollak who gave a great talk on Scala and Lift in Erik Meijer’s “Functional and Concurrent Programming Languages Applied” track. I found it interesting that in Lift he uses some of the same request dispatching techniques I use in my work with Yaws, even though he’s writing in Scala and I in Erlang. Functional languages rule.

Speaking of Erlang, Francesco Cesarini was there, also speaking in Erik’s track. He talked about Erlang concurrency and the continued development of Erlang’s SMP capabilities. Jan Lehnardt gave a couple of CouchDB talks, which seems to just keep garnering more and more interest, and rightfully so. Dennis Byrne gave a talk on Erlang and DSLs — I unfortunately missed it but knowing Dennis I’m sure it was thought-provoking and worthwhile.

It was also fun getting to see and hang out with Jay Fields and Glenn Vanderburg again. Both are extremely sharp.

Thanks again to the QCon organizers for another wonderful conference, and I’m already looking forward to QCon London next March.