My First QCON

Recently I attended QCON 2013 in New York City and was quite impressed with the conference. I highly recommend it to software architects, developers, managers and even CTOs.

Billed as an International Software Development Conference I can certainly say it was focused on software development and had an international flavor to it given I met so many people from Europe and elsewhere outside of North America. While I have attended many other technical conferences, and JavaOne a half dozen times, what I really liked about this conference was the breadth of topics and the intellectual intimacy available - that is, it was really easy to talk one-on-one with people, experts, geniuses on a wide range of issues. I especially enjoyed the 'unconference' or open sessions where topics just evolved on the spot.

I opted for 5 full days, two days of tutorials and the three main conference days. I will report on specific topics later, but some of the interesting themes I noted included:

• Privacy & Security. Given the recent controversies in the news regarding the NSA collecting information, and revelations by Edward Snowden (and others), there was a lot of chat on that subject, and some people did ad hoc revisions to their keynote addresses (i.e. Bruce Schneier). In a world where 'data science' is progressing rapidly, and databases are getting bigger and bigger, a lot of people were asking questions about the role of scientists with respect to ethics and morals.
• Functional Programming. I have been working hard to become more proficient with Scala and Functional Programming for about 5 years now, and recently completed Functional Programming Principles in Scala. I am really glad I had that background before attending because in addition to an entire track called 'Post Functional' the theme of Functional Programming seemed to be all around, and I was able to absorb an appreciate the presentations much better.
• Polyglot Architectures. There was an entire track devoted to this, and it is a really interesting and controversial subject. What I see is a spectrum from full polyglot solutions integrating dozens of programming languages and technologies, to efforts to minimize this down to a single language and platform for all devices. For example, Paul Snively dreams of a small team of developers building a universal application in OCaml that runs on iOS, OS X, Android, Chrome, Linux, Windows, etc.

This was also my first time in New York City, so I stay for an extra week of vacation. What an awesome place, if you have never been I strongly recommended visiting there. I even attended a block party hosted by the Bridgerunners of Brooklyn where there must have be 10 or 20 other motorcycle clubs attending. The music and other entertainment was great, if not unique.