QCon Friday

And then it was Friday. Fatique was setting in, but we were determined to take it to the end. There were some really interesting tracks today.

The day started off with Randy Shoup talking about the architecture behind eBay. This was really architecture on the highest level. The amount of data/transactions/servers etc that ebay has is huge. An impressive talk, the slides are warmly recommended.

After that BBC talked about there architecture to bring media (video) to their users. A nice talk (especially since they filled in for Twitter at the last moment) but they had the disadvantage of being preceded by eBay which was hard to match.

At the same time Bart was at a presentation about Haskell in the "programming languages of the future" track. That track covered a number of programming languages which might (or might not) be the next big thing, such as Scala, F# and Erlang. Saillant point is that Haskell has been around for a long time and was removed from our curriculum some 5 years ago. Bart said that the presentation about Haskell by some professor was the best he had seen at QCon. "Pure theatre."

After that we went to the presentation about Erlang, a new programming language that's especially suited for use with concurrency. The language is hot on the fashionlists and might become very relevant with the rise of multicore systems. Take a look at the slides when they are available. One to watch. Joe Armstrong (called "the nutty professor" by another participant) also wrote a book about it.

After that the long awaited Rails 2.0 track, which after one minute I knew wasn't really what I wanted. Dr Nic explained at length the changes from Rails 1.2.6 to 2.0.1, not really what a beginner is looking for. Still, there was something to be learnt about IDE's and participating in open source.

After that Jan scored a polo-shirt at JavaBlackBelt (missing the first prize, 10 books at the O'Reilly stand by just an inch) and we went back home. The delay wasn't too bad this time.