We will write a more extensive blog post on Syneto's blog, so here I will present only my personal impressions.
First impression: This is a huge event!
I never attended such a big conference. There were more than 900 attendees and the main room had 5 screens, the big one, in the centre on the image above was 10 meters or so in diagonal. They also managed to secure some very wealthy sponsors who kept our bellies full and prevented our mouth to dry out. The other 2 rooms were smaller, but still impressive.
Second impression: There at most 5% of new information in a talk.
For whatever reason I had huge expectations from this conference. However I have to realize that a talk can not contain more than 5% new and useful information. At least not for me and my colleagues. This was a hard thing to realize, but it led to the next one.
Third impression: The value of a conference is in the chance of speaking with famous people.
Yes. You need some guts, but if you want real value for the money you payed for the conference, you must go and talk with those important people. For some I had questions in order to obtain new information, for others just to confirm some of my own ideas and perceptions and for other I actually managed to provide constructive feedback.
All in all I talked with more famous people in 2 days than in my whole life altogether. So I thank you Bruce Eckel, Dan North, Eric Evens, Gerard Meszaros, Theo Schlossnagle, John Hughes, Simon Brown for your time and for every other speaker for their great talks.
