The quality of the presentations was excellent. I really liked all of them. This was the most important thing to me because I went there to see the presentations. I didn't care whether the Wi-Fi was slow or if the food was not particularly tasty. I attend conferences to see new things. (Well the food was nothing special, but who cares?) I have attended other conferences before and there were usually a few presentations that were boring or not very good. However, this was not the case with GeeCON! I was pleasantly surprised. Kudos to the GeeCON team and all the speakers. You did a great job.
Presentations
I will not go into detail about the presentations, but there are some things that are definitely worth mentioning:
- Stephan Herrmann talked about Object Teams. It looked interesting, and seemed to be a mixture of anaemic service graphs, rich domain models and aspects. (Stephan, please forgive me for that noob explanation :-)) Fortunately, Stephan is able to attend our upcoming Eclipse DemoCamp. I am looking forward to hearing a more in-depth explanation and getting hands-on experience.
- Staffan Nöteberg explained the Pomodoro Technique. Despite the fact that it was about a technique that can be used to cope with interruptions, his presentation was hilarious. I was roaring with laugher when he pulled a Teletubby out off his rucksack to represent the project manager. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a pomodoro kitchen timer...
- Dawid Weiss from Poznan University of Technology gave us an insights into Java in high-performance computing. Instead of slides he used one huge image to show all his content and moved, panned and zoomed around the entire presentation. This was quite a dynamic way to do a presentation.
- Towards the end of GeeCON, Bruno Bossola talked about object orientation for non-believers. Why for non-believers? This was because he was mocking us (the audience) all the time, which earned him a few laughs. He was really funny, and he was right: Persistence and frameworks are not that important. However, requirements and domain models are. In a nutshell, proper object oriented analysis and design are relevant. We have forgotten what OO really stands for.