StackOverflow DevDays - sad rant :(

Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend StackOverflow DevDays London.  I'm planning to do a detailed write up about the event shortly.  But just wanted to have a quick moan about a couple of bad points about the day.

Firstly, my phone did this very early in the day:

Phone = paper-weight!

Fortunatley I also had my blackberry with me so was able to take this picture but it only had a little bit of battery left to only allow me a couple of tweets during the rest of the day.  This meant I couldn't be my usual twittering self at a conference thereby missing out on what I find to be a useful part of such events.  This was further compounded as it meant I couldn't engage with helloapp.  I had heard about this when FOWA was on and was keen to see it in action.  On top of not being able to interact via twitter, I didn't take a laptop so couldn't use the web based site.  There was no dedicated mobile interface and the AJAX requirements of the site meant it was unusabel on mobile devices.  I noticed a lot of other people trying and failing to get it working on various mobeil devices. If Carsonififed are interested in adapting helloapp for greater mobile interaction and thereby allowing more people to use it and engage with other attendees I'd love to have that conversation.

Second issue of the day;
At the start of the lunch break I had a chance to talk to Joel about the CountDown app I wrote and he used at the start of the day and during breaks.

• Yes this is the code he used in his Fogbugz/Kiln demo. I had a strong sense of Déjà Vu during this as I used FogBugz to track features and fixes during it's development and also hosted the source in Kiln, as an early beta user.
• Yes this is the app I've written (banged on?) about before.
  

Anyway, because I was talking, I joined the lunch queue late. Before I got to the front of the queue we were told that food had run out but more would be available in 4 minutes. About 10 minutes later we were told some food would be available shortly. A few minutes later the lunch break was over and it was back to business - but still no food available.

Yes, I could have raced to get food when the lunch break started but that wouldn't have helped the 50 or so other people (my estimate) who were still queuing and also didn't get food during the break. 

I gave up waiting when Jeff came on to give his talk. I then skipped the Qt talk to get a sandwich.
All very disappointing.


Proper review and details of all the good bits will follow. Promise!


Note to self for future conference attendance:
1-Take loads of phones (not a problem - but must make sure they're charged!)
2- Get a netbook so can get online while there. This will allow doing things which don't have mobile support - (Boo!). Plus, anything larger than a 10" screen seems to big to carry around all day.