Oredev - Post conference review

Ayende pinged me on Skype and asked “How do you fancy a holiday in Sweden?”

It turns out that for one reason or another he wasn’t able to make it for his scheduled RavenDB workshop and unrelated session at Oredev, one of the “best conferences in the world”, and I was being asked if I’d like to try and substitute.

The TLDR version of this post is “If you’re ever asked to do something like this, then just do it and don’t look back”, I had an amazing time, met some amazing people and learned a lot from the process.

The longer version is well…

Monday - Workshops

At this point I hadn’t prepared for the workshop at all (although I had a lot of material for that, and I had prepared the talk for Friday, I didn’t know what a workshop really entailed). I settled in by attending a Neo4j workshop and A MongoDB workshop in order to see if I could gain some ideas about how to conduct the RavenDB workshop I’d have to run the next day.

The Neo4j workshop was ran by @emileifrem, and was very well put together, with a series of tests that we would have to make pass after a small presentation beforehand. Unfortunately there were a large number of downloads over a slow internet connection required and this made things tricky.

The MongoDB workhop was ran by @mathias_mongo and was done in a very different style, where we could choose to keep up or not as we went along and he walked us through, in contrast to Neo4j, there was very little to download which made following along technically easy (although with my attention span, I ended up just fiddling with other things whilst passively listening).

Monday – Evening

Not much to talk about here, other than most of the attendees/speakers got naked, jumped in a sauna and the ocean, repeated that performance a few times and ate some nice food in the restaurant at the same venue. Met some interesting people here and this definitely set the tone for the rest of the week; a very good way of kicking off a conference indeed.

Tuesday – Workshops

This morning, I got up and started working on the workshop (already having a lot of material, just not know how to present it), I decided to combine the workshop approaches from the previous day – combining the test-driven approach of the Neo4j session with the minimal requirements of the MongoDB session. I rudely did this in @RoyOsherove’s workshop about unit testing, because I wanted to hear him talk and figured I would pick up some stuff along the way (And I was not disappointed, he’s a great presenter).

My workshop itself went to plan, although as per usual I went a bit fast most people did keep up and I think the vast majority of people were satisfied with it (thankfully), I really enjoyed running it and learned a few things for the next times.

Tuesday – Evening

Well, this was splendid – pre-drinks at @noopman’s house with the speakers, followed by dinner at Malmo city hall – ended up stood chatting with @jeremydmiller, @NolanBushnell and @RoyOsherove before we went in,  and ended up on a table with a few of these delightful people surrounded by glorious finery (amazing chandeliers and history, etc).

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – Sessions + great converations/new friends

After the initial two days, the rest becomes a big blur of amazing sessions, ad-hoc sessions where I talked about Raven, ad-hoc sessions where others talked about their projects, and a few discussions with various people about either Raven, or the sessions they had just ran, were about to run, or the session I was to run on Friday, here is a quick rundown of the things that stuck in my mind.

• Keynote: Jeff Norris from NASA – Legendary, nothing much more to say about this keynote, funny, entertaining, informative.
• Keynote: Noland Bushell – If you have to ask then you lose some serious geek-cred…
• @gregyoung: both of his talks very opinionated but in a good way, you can’t argue with common sense, and there was an awful lot of it floating around here.  He also announced Mighty Moose at the conference, which you need to check out if you haven’t already and you’re a .NET developer.
• @jeremydmiller: I had already informally arranged to meet up and talk Fubu/MVC,  and now that has happened I’m excited to be finally thinking about upgrading our multi-tenant work-project to Fubu in the coming months, it will be a good  fit. I caught one and a half of his talks too, and again it’s very difficult to argue with the vast amounts of common sense wafting around here.
• The multiple ad-hoc RavenDB talks I ended up doing in the coffee room, these were really cool – I am always happy to talk tech to people who are so capable of “getting it” with so little explanation, this goes for everybody at the conference, and I’ll write more about that in a bit.
• I had a good meeting with @bradwilson about ASP.NET MVC, talking about how I use it in our multi-tenant systems and verifying I wasn’t doing anything overly stupid…
• Popping to the pub with @gregyoung to talk about Mighty Moose and Event Sourcing, I am more favourable about the latter after these conversations, and I’m beginning to think that it’s more widely applicable than I thought as a way of easily keeping a audit trail, repeatability, pushing data to multiple destinations etc.
• I made a point of stopping by the Jetbrains stand and chatting to @hhariri about document databases and development in general, an absolute pleasure indeed.
• The 15 minute RavenDB talk on the “Oredev Open” Thursday night was a lot of fun, thanks to all who attended, I hope you got something out of the blur that it was.
• Dinner with @jeremydmiller and @athought (and wife, don’t know if she is on Twitter) on Friday night, I responded to an open Twitter invite and I was the only one to turn up – I could have been made to feel incredibly out of place with three people who already knew each other so well, and I want to extend the warmest thanks at this point for that not being the case, I really enjoyed and appreciated the quiet and more-relaxed company.
• A final four-way coding session on Friday night with @gblock, @jeremydmiller and @philiplaureano demoing through RavenDB with a lot of sensible questions and feedback, although by this point my brain was getting seriously fried!
• A  final shout-out to the Barista, those guys making me awesome coffee every day completely made my week.

If I’ve missed anybody out (I’ve done my best to name-drop everybody!) then sorry, because that’s the thing about this conference. There were so many people to talk to, and everybody was so willing to talk! It wasn’t possible to stop in one place for more than 5 minutes without starting a conversation with somebody.

And not only conversation, but genuinely interesting conversation (for me anyway) on so many fronts with so many diverse people, this conference was great because of that – the level of understanding throughout was staggering, I must admit I felt intimidated at times by the sheer wall of intellect I was encountering (countered by the friendliness).

With this, I am going to extend a massive thank-you to @ayende for trusting me with his baby at this event, and @michaeltiberg also for helping me get there.

I am going  to make a serious effort to get to the next one (either as speaker or attendee), and to keep in touch with a number of the people I met, I know I’m not very good at that aspect of my life so I’ll do my best and see where that gets us.

[Usual RavenDB posts are en-route, entries are queued already, written on the plane and in sleepless nights!]