DevDays Amsterdam 2009 Review
November 12, 2009The DevDays event took place in Amsterdam last week, a one day event about software development. Behind it stands Stack Overflow, also known as Spolky’s software Q and A site, and himself of course. My overall impression was not great I have to say. Something that played role in my slight disappointment was the organization itself. I found the venue very small relative to the amount of people, pretty noisy since the catering facility was in the same room and most importantly quite cold; I spent most of the event wearing my jacket. Lunch was ok but the queue was incredibly long and the sandwiches not enough. Nevertheless, to give the organizers some credit, wifi was working fine at all times.
The day began with a very entertaining talk of Joel Spolsky about the debate between simplicity and power. Do we need all these features or is it better to keep it simple but guaranteed to work properly? Bringing Salginatobel Bridge as an example, he praised the combination of elegance and modesty; in other words software should hide its complexity behind a simple and easy to use interface. And what is the drive of humanity to do anything, even to write (good) software? According to Joel it is to become more attractive and increase the chances of copying our DNA 
I would agree with him here!
The next talk was about jQuery. I do not know that much about it, but I got the impression that the talk was more like someone summarizing its documentation. Even thought there were few interesting points, it wasn’t well delivered in order to catch my attention. After this, there was a talk about the QT toolkit, apparently pronounced cutie and not cute after Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech. The talk pointed out QT’s platform independency, however not supporting for instance the iPhone; at least not yet… Last talk before lunch was a promotional talk of Joel Spolsky about FogBugz. Despite the whole marketing content I was pretty impressed by the capabilities of the tool: automatic velocity calculation, probability estimation of project completion by date, automatic creation of burn-down charts, ability to break a task in subtasks and estimate them instead of the whole task, code review support etc. I would like to give it a try!
The first talk after lunch was about Python. The speaker, Simon Willison, a bash and Python guru gave a live command line presentation, which I actually found really interesting and informative. The most useful tip for absolute Python beginners, like me, is the virtue of the interactive interpreter. You can first experiment as much as you want and then later create the real stuff using parts of your previous attempts, since the complete history is there for you. All in all, for the first time I was really persuaded for python’s benefits.
The following talk was about the Google App Engine. Nick Johnson deployed an application in very little time. One thing I didn’t like about it is the fact that it supports only relational databases at the moment. As far as language flexibility is concerned, it supports anything that can be compiled to Java bytecode with potential of extension in the future. The next presenter, Christian Heilmann, talked about Yahoo Development Network. Even though it wasn’t one of the talks that brought me to the event, I was positively surprised both by the content and the speakers presentation skills. What to take out if this talk? Check YQL, if you haven’t done it yet, an SQL like query language to manipulate data across the Internet.
Finally the day ended with a talk about ASP .NET MVC. Even though the demo was ok, I found the talk a little bit slow, so given the time of the day I spaced out and decided to leave a little bit earlier. Overall, for next year, I would probably give it one more try, but I would pay more attention at the list of speakers. Also, if it takes place in a different venue, it would be a plus.