HotSos 2009 Highlights

HotSos was amazing. Here are some of the things I loved best about it:

1. The people. Attendees and presenters a like. Everyone was smart, insightful and had a good story to share. People who met me there may have trouble believing that I’m normally very shy and quiet. But everyone was so nice and interesting that I found myself talking to many more people than I normally do. This was an incredible social event (yes, and I’m geeky enough to consider conferences as social events).
2. Chris Date presentation was fascinating. I usually stay away from “useless theory”, but Chris Date gave a good show, and from now on I’ll always remember that “An Object is not a Relation!”.
3. Karen Morton did magic tricks on her presentation! That was by far the coolest thing I’ve seen on any technical conference.
4. Henry Poras was the best discovery of the symposium. Everyone says that Queue Theory is important, but only Henry can show you how to use it to identify bottlenecks.
5. Toons Koppelaars had some very good insights about what went wrong with app development, and he created great graphics to explain them.
6. Ah, my own presentation was… well, I’m not sure. I got mixed feedback.  A lot of people showed up, I hope most of them enjoyed it, and I learned a lot on how to improve my presentation style.
   BTW. I put up a presentation page, which contains my paper, slides, code etc.
7. Seeing the HotSos staff dressed as pirates! It was a great party.
8. Jonathan Lewis training day was great. I did not think I can stay fascinated for 8 hours.
9. People came up to me and said “I like your blog”. You have no idea how happy this made me 🙂

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