So it’s monday and I am getting started with work but thought I should try writing a retrospective of Dyncon 2011 during the day. In summary it was a nice and largish crowd (about 85), a spacious and good venue in the middle of the city (office of BWin/Ongame) with a great view from the 11th floor and a good lineup of speakers. Perhaps I am getting old though but having this many speakers doing 40 min presentations for two full days… well, I kinda like to have time to sit down and chat with people and show stuff and so on. Not much time for that, and 40 minutes means that most presentations got stressed for time even though flying on a rather high level. But still, a fun and interesting conference!
For me the most interesting part was talking with Joe Armstrong, it turned out he wanted a bridge between Erlang and Squeak and was looking for someone to write a Socket server for him in Squeak. Funny enough I know quite a lot about that, but more on that in another post. I was also somewhat pleasantly surprised about his knowledge of the Smalltalk community and his view of Smalltalk. I forgot to point him to my “bashing” of his OO article a few years back :)
At the end of the day I would say it was a success but if I were to organize a follow up conference I would try to have a few longer presentations, mixed with a some very short ones. And also put in some other kind of “format” - like a panel debate and also more time to just “hang” together and self organize a bit. Well, just my 2 cents.