That said, I’m rejiggering priorities, and pretty high on the list was getting this site updated — particularly the Speaking and Upcoming Events pages. If you’re interested in knowing where I’ve been and where I’ll be, take a look! (And expect new content here shortly!)

In a lot of ways, Austin reminded me of the very first Developer Day, back in March of last year. Some of the lessons in logisitics that we learned at that first event, in particular, were significantly reinforced by our experiences in Austin. Despite a few hiccups, however, the event as a whole went over well. I think we were able to bring together at least a few people who don’t often meet up – front-end developers and Rubyists, with a few Pythonists and others in the mix.

Our lineup of talks was front-end heavy this go-round, and that was interesting; I though Kyle Simpson and Alex Sexton did a great job bringing the JavaScript thunder, for instance, and I’m encourage to bring in more front-end talks at future events (especially because JavaScript is almost a lingua franca for web developers at this point). Unfortunately, I had to leave midway through the day (the aforementioned snowmageddon incident), so I missed Aaron Bedra, Eitan Suez, and Bruce Tate, each of whom I was excited to see.

And a few words about Austin… first, Austin is clearly Gowalla territory. Stepping off the plane, I was struck by how many featured spots there were, and it made bopping from place to place a lot of fun. Second, it was much colder than I expected. If I thought I underdressed for Boulder last year, it was nothing compared to the mismatch of expectations that Austin (and Dallas, on the way back) triggered.

Anyways, I think Austin provided a good start for the 2010 Developer Day season, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the series – speaking of which, the next event is February 27th in Durham, NC, so if you’re anywhere nearby register today!

I did notice a couple of differences between CodeMash and the Ruby/open source conferences I normally attend, however. First, the gender balance was, while still skewed, was much closer than I’m used to. I remember hearing somewhere that there were more women in enterprise computing (.Net and Java) than in the more fringe technologies, and I guess I’ve got anecdotal evidence to back that up, now.

Also, the sponsorship atmosphere was very different – in fact, it felt more like the Startup Crawl than it did the Expo Hall at RailsConf. Sponsor booths had video games, coding problems, and a ton of giveaways (both raffles and freebies), and their staff were a bit more assertive.

My talk (an updated version of the one I gave at RubyConf) went over well, I think – no ratings on SpeakerRate yet, but (like all technical conferences) there were substantial problems with the wifi, so I’m hoping that people will rate it once they return home. I did fail in one significant way, however: I didn’t consider my audience as carefully as I should have. The needs of an audience of .Net, Java, and related technologists are somewhat different than those of a room full of Rubyists. I got a question on Neo4j‘s licensing, for instance, that hasn’t come up in any of the half-dozen or more times I’ve talked about it previously.

I don’t think that this problem affected the presentation itself, but it’s certainly something I should have done for the question period.

• Some people wanted to see more of the domain modeling part, either because they still weren’t convinced that comics, etc., are hard to model relationally, or they enjoyed seeing me get riled up.
• Other people wanted to see more of the alternative database part. Generally, these people already knew that some domains were hard to model, or they had other needs that were pushing them towards a NoSQL solution and they wanted more background and examples.

Given that feedback, I finally bit the bullet and split the talk into two, each of which will hopefully please one audience. RubyConf was the first time I’ve given either of these, and I’m thinking that NoSQL: Death to Relational Databases(?) was a success.

First, the slides:

I think the slides from this talk are more capable of standing alone than many of my more recent decks, so I won’t go into much detail here. Basically, I spoke about five reasons people are looking at NoSQL solutions now, described four major families (key-value stores, column- and document-oriented databases, and graph databases), showed how those families generally stack up for the aforementioned reasons, and gave a quick example of how to use one or two systems from each family (e.g., Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, Neo4J), all before wrapping up by describing several scenarios that might demand hybrid solutions.

I tried a couple of different things in this talk. I’ve looked at integrating the backchannel before (taking questions over Twitter, etc.), but with the conference wifi in a pretty bad state that wasn’t possible. I’ve also been thinking about ways to keep the backchannel going after the talk itself, which Twitter, IRC, and the like can’t handle. To that end, I’ve set up a Google Wave for the talk – if you’d like to join in the discussion, try this link (if it doesn’t work, you can search on ‘with:public NoSQL Death to Relational Databases’ and it should pop up).

I also decided to provide a few explicit next steps for the audience. Much too often, speakers leave their goals – what they want the audience to do as a result of their talk – implicit, expecting the audience to pick it up by osmosis and be instantly motivated to do it. Unfortunately, that never really happens, so I went ahead and stated my goals outright.

I got some great face-to-face feedback after the talk, and I was very happy with how it went. SpeakerRate hasn’t been as uniformly positive, however, and I’m afraid that the wifi situation prevented a number of people who attended from rating and/or leaving a comment – at the moment, I’ve only got nine ratings, when the room was mostly full. All in all, though, I’m encouraged by the talk, and I’m looking forward to giving it again (updated, of course) at CodeMash in January.

If you’ve got ideas for how RailsConf could be the very best it can be, I’m all ears! Feel free to leave a comment here, or email me.