Wow. My 4th QCon London. That’s not bad. And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for 2013, 2012, and even 2007 (part 1 & part 2 - how cute was I? “agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important”)). I can’t even tell you what I did on the first day, I was mostly panicking about my presentation - I was inspired after my trip to New York last month to change my talk at the last (responsible?

InfoQ has posted the video of Dan North and I opining on the subject of hiring. Most of the talk is spent on how to be a good interviewer, and touches on how to market your company to prospective hires. We spend less time on how to do well as an interviewee, but in theory if you know what’s going through the interviewer’s mind, you should be in a much better position to take control of the interview and shine.

I like QCon London, I really do. Not only is it on home turf, but, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t just focus on technology, or a set of technologies.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.

(Updated 15 Dec 2020 with correct completed status!) Investigate Maven 2 for builds Have a glance at TestNG unit testing (completed 2013) Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework (completed ~2009) Play with GWT. (completed 2009-2013) Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax. Maybe I’ve “grown out” of front end development but that doesn’t prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture. Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it’s worth the effort I’m going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress.

Last week saw the first QCon London conference, an event “designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers”. The conference consisted of two days of tutorials followed by three days of talks covering technologies, vendor products, and processes. In addition there were numerous “networking” opportunities with plenty of break times to both absorb information and meet other people, plus evening events.