After DevDay 2012 in Kraków

It's almost a week since DevDay 2012 conference that was held in Kraków, Poland, but I think it's still not too late to share my thoughts about this quite fabulous event. First of all, it was completely free, what at once gives you great price/quality ratio. But even if it had been paid conference, it would be worth paying. Top-class speakers, very interesting topics and ideas and perfect organization. A pity it was one day only.

Let me summarize each session briefly.

1. Scott Hanselman - It's not what you read, it's what you ignore

Scott is for sure one of the best developers amongst showmen and best showmen amongst developers. His session about productivity was absolutely great. Even if he doesn't say anything revolutionary, everything was worth reminding. These rather well-known ideas applied to our developers world with a great sense of humour made a good start. And hey, Scott doesn't suck that much! ;)

2. Mark Rendle - Hidden Complexity: Inside Simple.Data and Simple.Web

First technical session, quite insightful yet interesting and easy to follow. Mark showed some crazy stuff he implemented in his software and I was really impressed how much we can squeeze out of our old friend C#. Finding a real-life example when overriding true operator to return false makes sense was amazing!

3. Sebastien Lambla - HTTP Caching 101

A bit chaotic but funny and practical session about misuses of HTTP caching, with some advice about how to send proper headers and what to look for when dealing with IE failing to conform to the standard. Quote of the session: "[you can go with much cleaner solution XYZ] if you're a purist, but I don't think you are as I know all six of them".

4. Rob Ashton - Javascript sucks and it doesn't matter

Great session about the role of JavaScript in nowadays developers world, exactly hitting the jackpot. Rob discussed the five phases of attitude towards JavaScript - from negation and frustration to acceptance and reconciliation. I'm almost arriving to the end of this path, so I felt this session was exactly about me and my experiences. He also gave some useful advice on testing, JS code structure etc.

5. Martin Mazur - Why you should talk to strangers

Nice session about the fact that we developers are all in the same craft, no matter in which technology we work in and how useful is to look broadly and borrow good ideas and solutions from the "others", even from PHP developers ;)

6. Antek Piechnik - Shipping code

Well-prepared and practical presentation about how the development looks like in Antek's company - and it is organized according to all the current trends. But actually I think the session would better match at career days at some university. It stood out a bit from the other sessions, but still was not bad.

7. Greg Young - How to get productive in a project in 24h

Interesting session about code metrics in practise. Greg shown some useful tools to quickly measure things in the project in order to identify most smelly areas. He calls for using version control system as a data source to be inquired for a lot of useful data. Very interesting conclusion of the very well-spent day!

What to add more? Looking forward for the next year!