Today is a lot better than yesterday
Until we started talking about weatherbug, not only were the speakers good, but the questions have been great, and Marc Cantor has mostly kept his mouth shut. I thought Steve Rubel’s talk was pretty good, but then the audience just started complaining about the product he was using as a case study. I finally asked a question, so I’ll be preserved for eternity in the podcast, but of course I forgot to say my name. For the record, I was the one who asked about “bad employee” blogs.
In general today was much, much better than yesterday. The speakers were interesting, if they were promoting something, they were willing to wrap it within a greater topic, the questions were on topic. It was much more interesting.
On a side note, most of the MSFT people that were here yesterday weren’t here today, so there was also a lot less pro-microsoft propaganda in the room which was a relief as well.
So to sum up…
If Gnomedex is about users and developers partying together, as a developer, I think it was pretty much a waste. I learned nothing really new. I heard opinions that I’ve heard expressed before, expressed again. I spent way too much time hearing about specific feature requests and bugs in software that I didn’t happen to use, and I had to listen to a lot of self-promotion and ego stroking.
If Gnomedex is a people aggregator, then I think it is more successful as an event, just maybe not for me. While it was great putting faces to voices that I’d heard on podcasts, I’m a bit too much of a wallflower and I didn’t really make any useful connections. Then again, there wasn’t really anyone there that was worth connecting to professionally, and while I respect the hell out of a bunch of those attendees, I really don’t need to play sycophantic fan-boy to any of them.
Will I go to Gnomedex 6? Maybe, but probably not. It depends on what I’m doing. There are a lot more interesting technical conferences that would probably be a better use of my time. If I have something that I want to promote, it would make a lot more sense. maybe.