The meme of the conference for me came from the keynote talk I did with Martin Fowler. The middleware vendors aren’t giving us big powerful software as they think, but instead of proffering big flabby software complete, with what came out during the talk as “enterprise man boobs.”
The slides are available at the QCon Web site, but they mightn’t make too much sense without the video (which the QCon guys will release in the coming months), apart from the picture of the flabby bloke whose man boobs will forever epitomise enterprise middleware.
Ade Oshineye captures much of the spirit of the event on his flickr stream.
On the SOA track things were good. Mark Little made his first foray into QCon with a historical perspective on all things distributed leading up to REST and WS-*. All round super-geek Steve Vinoski did his atonement thing too :-) I managed to miss Udi’s tutorial, but since he’s launched a charm offensive to get it on the QCon San Fran 2008 conference I might catch it then.
I did my Internet cat sketch, but I don’t think I was angry enough about the demise of WS-* this time around. There just wasn’t a Borat moment to act as the catalyst.
Otherwise I prowled the halls and dropped into things that seemed interesting at the time and overall learned an awful lot of good things.
Next up is DevSummit Stockholm and then the Australian Architecture Forum and JAOO Australia (JAOO-n under perhaps?) where man boobs will move to the next level. Oh yes.
