Went to the first SyncConf on Thursday. It was pretty varied conference with a good spread of people and talks.
There were two tracks agile and tech, I went back and forth between them.
The sessions I went to went to were.
Keynote – Kevlin Henney
Big Data for Real People – Chris Osborne
Some lessons learned from presenting complex data to people and people allergies to graphs.
Tackling Complex Data with Neo4j – Ian Robinson
Lots of info here on what was to me a new idea – graph based databases. Seems a great idea for the types of situation where it would excel. I’ll be trying this out on my machine to see what it can do.
Behaviour Driven Development – Liz Keogh
Not so much what BDD is or at all codey but trying to analyse in what situations BDD is a good fit and using BDD as part of the discovery process on a new project.
Developing iOS Apps for Fun and Profit – Phil Nash
All about Phils’ experience of creating a ‘Risk’ based iphone game in his annual leave. Also about objective C and its origins.
Breaking News and Breaking Software – Andy Hume
How Andys team at the guardian monitor their site as they update it. Also their mobile site architecture and the directions they are moving towards when resources fail. Which resources are absolutely necessary for the page and which are secondary. Making sure you always deliver the essential news element.
Endnote: Sean Phelan
Sean talked about his experiences story of multimap from founding through to eventually selling to Microsoft. He then went on to describe what an Angel investor wants to hear in your pitch. Based on his experience as an Angel investor.
The organisers Paul and John are planning for next year already. Its great that there is a technology conference in Norwich, lets look forward to future ones.
