The QCon London conference is on in early March (5-7). It is always a conference I look forward to since it is vendor neutral, though with an agile flavour. Although it covers high scale systems it is not the place to go if you think heavyweight Enterprise middleware from a big name vendor will solve your problems. In fact, it was QCon where I heard Martin Fowler and Jim Webber from Thoughtworks expound on Does my Bus look big in this? (what a great title) in which they argue that whatever software need you have, an Enterprise Service Bus is not the best way to meet it. You are not going to hear this kind of disruptive address at vendor-driven events.
So what is on this year? There are 15 tracks, some covering the buzzwords of the day like Big Data Architecture, DevOps, Internet of Things (two different tracks on this) and Bleeding Edge HTML5 and JavaScript (with case studies from Netflix and the Financial Times). Next Gen Cloud intrigues me because it covers multi-cloud services.
Java is almost conspicuous by absence (though it will no doubt show up throughout) but there is a track on Not Only Java which looks at performance tuning, garbage collections, lambdas and streams in Java 8, and more.
In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, Privacy and Security gets a track to itself, long overdue.
So how does QCon choose its tracks? It’s done by a committee of community experts, InfoQ CEO Floyd Marinescu told me.
Over 15 people came together, facilitated by QCon, and through an intensive multi-week process debated and voted down our tracks until we had these final 15. We do place some constraints such as a desire to have a certain balance of tracks to cover areas of innovation of interest to different communities such as project managers, architects, engineers as well as operations people.
What really counts of course is the speakers, and this year they include Jafar Husain (technical lead at Netflix), Eva Andreasson who pioneered deterministic garbage collection, Graham Tackley, director of architecture at Guardian News and Media, Erik Meijer who created Microsoft’s LINQ, and Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang.
If you book with the code “itwriting50” you will get a £50 discount.
We used Tibco Rendezvous in one of my previous projects. We dumbed down the whole thing, and crammed our data into a limited set of “bus routes” to utilize the queueing and guaranteed delivery mechanisms only, leaving out all the fancy publish/subscribe stuff which originally could be used to push content into desktop apps. I guess you could call it a slimmed down bus (Is that a Taxi?). It would have been awesome to have been at that presentation!