devLINK Summary

Last weekend was the devLINK 2008 conference in Murfreesboro, TN.  This was an awesome conference.

A lot of people have already put up their take on the conference, but for me, the Open Spaces made the event.  There were a lot of great conversations.  The essence of some of these open spaces sessions were captured on a new wiki that sprang up after the event.  I hope to see this wiki grow in the future as we have more open space events.  It would also be cool if we could flesh out more of the notes that were taken since some of it only makes sense if you were there.

I ended up only attending one “eyes front” presentation and that was Keith Rome’s talk on Parallel Computing in .NET.  I had two reasons for attending this: 1) I have an interest in this topic and 2) I was giving a PLINQ session the next day so I wanted to see what he would cover in his talk.  It was a very good talk.  I started to attend the deep dive into Silverlight but the projector was displaying a giant yellow blob on the screen so they moved us to a new room that was a little too small for everyone.  I decided to head back out to the Open Spaces and I walked in on an open space about Rules Engines which turned out to be pretty interesting.

It was very cool to see respected names in the .NET Community walking around the conference and participating in the Open Spaces.  I saw both Richard Campbell, Ted Neward and Joe Stagner attending open spaces.  I was also very happy to see that Carl Franklin decided to record an impromptu DNR at the bar after the conference.  This episode gives a lot of information about what Open Spaces are all about from Alan Stevens (the guy responsible for Open Spaces at devLINK) as well as the insight of several of the attendees and speakers on the .NET community in the region.

The DNR talks about two types of attendees for devLINK: the people who came for the eyes front presentations and the people who came for the Open Spaces.  Both styles of learning are valid and extremely helpful.  Sometimes you want to go to a presentation to get a lot of information about a topic or technology in a short amount of time.  It saves you time and research on your own and hopefully the speakers shares some really good gems with you.  On the other hand, if you want to have an open discussion about a topic with some really smart folks then the Open Spaces is a good way to get that.  If you attend an event that has Open Spaces I highly recommend at least attending one to see what the experience is like.  If you don’t like that conversation you can always move on to another open space or head off to a presentation.

As for my talk, I think it went pretty well.  I had about 20 people in the room and only one of them fell asleep (I think he was actually left over from the previous talk in that room, but I can’t be sure). 

Enough rambling; if you didn’t attend devLINK this year I highly recommend trying to make it in 2009!