on conferences, part #2

Also late, but at least it's only a few weeks late, I also attended the first Qt Contributors summit, in Berlin in June. Berlin seemed like a fairly typical european city , at least to me, although my experience admittedly isn't that broad yet. I had a few problems with some unfriendly locals making my trip a little more hasslesome than it would perhaps have been otherwise, but all in all, I quite enjoyed it. I don't think my friend John did, though, as he lost his luggage. :)

Meeting so many Qt folks was great, the content of the discussions was intriguing, and I'm sure that some solid work has been laid for the future. I know that I got quite a few ideas for my current pet project, poking at the guts of QFileSystemWatcher to make it much more useful, and hopefully less resource intensive (in most situations) by means of not using a thread internally for no good reason. But that's material for another day.

on conferences

Just a short post, as I'm by now fashionably late for this.

I attended MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in May, my greatest thanks to my excellent employer, Collabora Ltd for sponsoring my trip. It was a pretty intense week for a lot of reasons, one of which being that the week before my visit, I was asked to demonstrate some software I have been working on, a sort of mesh synchronised object store.

I showed off a simple contacts application synchronising contacts across three devices, but my real plans for that are a lot more - but that is content for another post, perhaps, another day. I think the show went pretty well, certainly, the reception of some parts of the keynote was a bit mixed.

It was also the first time I have visited the US before, and it was certainly a different experience to practically anywhere I have been before. San Francisco was an interesting place in particular to visit, with extreme contrast (people living on the streets with obvious mental issues, while there are villas in the background etc.) and typical cultural differences, some of which I found quite strange, like mandatory tipping. All in all, I think I'd visit again, though.

The conference itself was quite excellent, lots of interesting talks going on, and as usual, meeting all the familiar faces - and making new friends - was fantastic. I only wish I had been less frantically busy and jetlagged (or tired after being busy) to make more of the experiences. By the time I had recovered from everything, the conference was almost over. Though thankfully, I spent an extra two days wandering the streets of the city seeing some sights.