Missing Features

Your correspondent spent the day at the StackOverflow Dev Day conference in Washington, DC. Overall the conference was great; Joel, Jeff and the Carsonified team should be very proud of all their hard work.

Highlights

• Power strips were all over the place, under the seats, for laptop power. Thank you!
• It was neat getting to chat to members of the FogCreek team face to face
• The jQuery team does a great job of branding jQuery speakers; the slides were fantastic: expertly branded, logically ordered and compellingly supportive of the speaker
• Great keynote theme: “How does your software help me copy my DNA?”
• The between speaker interlude program was great (having a count down timer made it easy to spend the brief downtime efficiently and the twitter feed was compellingly interactive)
• The wifi actually worked
• Lunch was both accessible and yummy (a rarity for conference food)
• The discussion topic by area lunch was a great idea
• The opening [scrums] (sp?) video was funny
• All of the talks were great: jQuery, iPhone development, the problems of backwards compatibility in language design, ASP.NET MVC, Google App Engine and the keynote.

Low lights

• The front door staff actually asked for paper tickets; you can fly on a plane without a paper ticket
• The name badges didn’t have StackOverflow rep printed on them (nor did they have a space to write that in)
• Parking was a pain
• The seats in the venue (balcony at least)  had no leg room, even for your vertically challenged correspondent
• It would have been nice if Jeff Atwood was on hand
• Bruce Eckel’s presentation on the problems of backwards compatibility could have used additional visual support and a bit more dialog polish

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