Black On Stuff

Last weekend I attended the 7th annual european conference for the independent software vendors. The conference was held in Köln (Cologne) Germany, in the Marriot Hotel. Each year there is another city where the conference takes place, like Strasbourg (France), Brussels (Belgium) and Cambridge (UK). Next year (2008) it will be done in Berlin for the first time. There is a reason for choosing this city: the wall of Berlin is the place where East meets West, so the organizers wanted something in the middle for both Eastern and Western European countries.

It was my first time at this conference (Avangate’s second time) and I must say that I was expecting more people to come. The speakers and the presentations were interesting but this is not the only reason to come. I was asking two guys from SmartSoft (Bulgaria) why they came and the answer was very natural: “we need to recharge our batteries, we have so many things to do (like web optimization, marketing etc) and do not have the time to do it and the conference just confirms us that we still need to do it. And there’s the beer too :-)” … That sums up why a software developer should be there: to meet people in the same business, to learn something from the people that already did it and of course to drink beer.

My overall feedback is this:

The location: Very good
The speakers: Very good
The topics: Good (can be improved)
Number of participants: Normal

The one thing that’s missing this event is the advertising. My guess is that not too many people know about it. And it’s a shame, because the organizers are doing the best they can to get key speakers and offer actual subjects.

The event started with a happy note with a remix of John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “imagine there’s only one browser, it’s name is Firefox, and we’ll only have to build just one website …” … I don’t know the words, maybe someone can post it somewhere as I catched on my camera just the end (available on YouTube).

Other resources:

Pictures of the event (and more) at shareware-beach
Pictures of the event at Avangate