Gnomedex 5.0 Afternoon 2nd Day
Today is a lot better than yesterday
Until we started talking about weatherbug, not
only were the speakers good, but the questions have been great, and Marc Cantor
has mostly kept his mouth shut. I thought Steve Rubel's talk was pretty good,
but then the audience just started complaining about the product he was using as
a case study. I finally asked a question, so I'll be preserved for eternity in
the podcast, but of course I forgot to say my name. For the record, I was the
one who asked about "bad employee"
blogs.
In general today was much, much
better than yesterday. The speakers were interesting, if they were promoting
something, they were willing to wrap it within a greater topic, the questions
were on topic. It was much more
interesting.
On a side note, most of
the MSFT people that were here yesterday weren't here today, so there was also a
lot less pro-microsoft propaganda in the room which was a relief as
well.
So to sum
up...
If Gnomedex is about users and
developers partying together, as a developer, I think it was pretty much a
waste. I learned nothing really new. I heard opinions that I've heard expressed
before, expressed again. I spent way too much time hearing about specific
feature requests and bugs in software that I didn't happen to use, and I had to
listen to a lot of self-promotion and ego
stroking.
If Gnomedex is a people
aggregator, then I think it is more successful as an event, just maybe not for
me. While it was great putting faces to voices that I'd heard on podcasts, I'm a
bit too much of a wallflower and I didn't really make any useful connections.
Then again, there wasn't really anyone there that was worth connecting to
professionally, and while I respect the hell out of a bunch of those attendees,
I really don't need to play sycophantic fan-boy to any of
them.
Will I go to Gnomedex 6? Maybe,
but probably not. It depends on what I'm doing. There are a lot more interesting
technical conferences that would probably be a better use of my time. If I have
something that I want to promote, it would make a lot more sense.
maybe.
Posted: Sat
- June 25, 2005 at 03:03 PM
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