Sells on the SellsCon

125 attendees and speakers from 6 countries (US, Canada, England, Malaysia, Netherlands and Peru), 21 states and 60 companies, ranging from vendors to expert practitioners and even a few poor souls trying to learn XML. 24 hours of talks and events spread over two days. 44 bloggers and 247 blog entries about the event itself (not including warm-up to the event or my own blog entries), nearly all of which were over-whelmingly positive, including one eWeek piece and one entry from Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems that called me "a charming, welcoming, amusing guy." (I didn't pay him a cent, I swear! : )

 

In general, day 1 was dark and brooding, shouldering the brunt of the vendors who knew the technology inside and out and were feeling the pain of the downsides that they felt were holding them back. Day 2 was filled with hopeful stories of practitioners able to take what the vendors have given them, mix it with for their own secret sauce and really make it shine.

 

My very most favorite talk was Whitney Kemmey from the DOD with his unexpectedly captivating look at mixing XML with 10-year old technology and his endless submarine pictures, although Jeff Barr from Amazon continues to mesmerize me every time he takes the podium. Also, I really dug Doug Purdy's enthusiasm and forthrightness. Oh, and when Neetu Rajpal shut down Don for derailing her talk, I fell in love.

 

Inexplicably, the DevCon seems to just get better and better. I blame it on the community willing to listen to a variety of sources to hear what's really going on, some of it good and some of it that needs some work, whether it's from professional speakers or nervous amateurs, for-profit vendors or seasoned practitioners. Thanks for letting me participate.

What do you think about the section titled "Microsoft Propaganda" in Kurt Cagle's weblog at http://metaphoricalweb.blogspot.com/2004/10/conferences-and-google.html

<quote>
What I didn't enjoy was the ten minute "movie" thrown at us promoting Microsoft Development Services, based upon a take-off of the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and portraying Linux and Java developers as being idiots who would be far more productive if they would only drink the Microsoft koolaid. To those of the faithful in the crowd, it was a funny piece, but to those of us who tend to straddle both worlds (and more, have moved away from Microsoft technology because of some of its inherent problems) the ad was insulting, and more, its placement within the Sells conference announced like nothing else that this was no longer a technology neutral forum but was instead a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Until that point, I had been enjoying the conference a great deal
</quote>

Was the video really that nasty?

The Whitney Kemmey talk was great. We (the crowd) missed an opprtunity for humor when he said they were using SGML for the project. "SGML, what's that? You mean Secret Government Markup Language?"

The video was meant in good fun and the audience laughed.

> The video was meant in good
> fun and the audience laughed.

This is what I thought...

A good example that "sense of humour" is very culturally-dependent and what seems funny in the context of one culture may be perceived as offensive in other contexts.

Seems KC was the only one to react in this way, though.

Do keep the good work, Chris!

Would videos from the conference be made available?

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