Oredev 2013


Last week I attended Oredev conference for the first time. First time in Malmo, first time in Sweden in fact.

Have to say I really enjoyed the venue, a good size. the catering also good, not to mention the free beer at the end of the day. Indeed, I was going to get some Swedish Krona from the cash machine when I was there, but completed the whole trip without any need to; just a couple of train tickets to/from Copenhagen airport, paid for on Visa. Criticisms: perhaps a bit short on power supplies for laptop, and the wifi (as is always the case at tech conferences) was a bit hit-and-miss.

Hotel too was good - and literally next door to the conference venue. Most of the speakers were staying there, so possible to have a conversation in the lounge area after the conference venue closed up at 10:30pm. And the conference organisers were very helpful, both before the event (eg providing clear instructions on logistics) and at it.

There were some good keynotes too (and some less good ones). Everyone, I think, enjoyed Randall Monroe’s xkcd talk, some great anecodotes, as was the talk on the “World of Minecraft”; now I understand what the game is about, I can see how people get immersed in it. Great examples of what could be done, some very funny stuff also. Back home we enjoyed watching up some of those same examples on youtube. Matthew McCullough’s talk was also good value; he always does a good and professional job. (The less said about the opening keynote on Wed am, though, the better).

As to the sessions, each were 50 minutes, and over a good variety of topics. I liked there was some techie stuff (Java, .NET, HTML5/JS) and some agile/process-y stuff, probably a 60:40 split. There were over 6 concurrent tracks, but each also was recorded and have already been uploaded to Vimeo. As for my own session, I’ll blog about that separately.

To sum up, overall, if you are thinking of attending Oredev - either as an attendee or as a speaker - then I can definitely recommend it.

November 14, 2013 conference