Reflections on QCon

Qcon is a “Conference for the Enterprise Software Development Community;” a pretty hardcore techie bunch then. So it was really refreshing to see a whole days track given over to usability and a keynote by Larry Constantine on “Meeting the Usability Challenge”. Last night Martin Fowler and Dan North gave an excellent keynote titled “The Yawning Crevasse of Doom”. Their central theme was around communication between the customer / end user / consumer / business and the developers / IT. Martin drew a great analogy; do you want your communication between the two “sides” to be like a ferry boat or a bridge. Part of the bridge that Martin and Dan talked about was the use of ethnographic research – observing users in their natural environments and storyboards / wireframes / lo-fi prototypes to visually articulate requirements in a way that written requirements can never do. i.e. championing the stuff that I am passionate about, and what we at ThoughtWorks do deliver successful projects.

A couple of other nuggets that are worth sharing; Jeff Sutherland talked about how at Google they don’t have performance appraisals. Instead everyone has personal “three month objectives” that are posted on their blogs (the first thing that a new recruit at Google does apparently is creates a personal web page). In this way people can share with the broader organisation what they are doing. With google search experts and their knowledge can easily be found. Advertising to the organisation what your goals drives performance far more effectively than a sterile quarterly form distributed by HR…

Jim Webber gave an excellent and entertaining presentation on Geurilla SOA. If you get a chance to see him in full opinionated flow, you should seize it. (And I don’t just say that because of his kind words about my presentation, that I’ll upload soon).

At the conference one of the vendors was JavaBlackBelt. They had a multiple choice test on your knowledge of Java. Some of my esteemed colleagues did not fair so well on it; my programming knowledge goes little beyond

10 print “hello world”
20 goto 10

So I am very proud to announce that I came top of the JavaBlackBelt class and won a t-shirt, scoring 3/5 in a little over 40 seconds, a cool 2 minutes faster than the second placed geek. Don’t you just love multiple choice.