Alfresco Developer Conference

We had a wonderful event in London. Everyone that attended both agrees: The two cities and venues were very different, but the Alfresco vibe of openness, collaboration, and innovation was going strong at both DevCon events.

If you missed a session in either location, we now have the DevCon presentations uploaded to SlideShare, so check them out.

If you are looking for London wrap-up posts, Day 1 and Day 2 are both covered on socialcontent.com.

And, if you want to check out some pics from both events, take a look at the San Diego set and London sets (Day 1, Reception, and Day 2) on our Flickr account.

Just a quick reminder to everyone joining us in London tomorrow for DevCon: The keynote will begin tomorrow morning at 8:30, sharp. Feel free to arrive early, pick up your badge, have some breakfast, and begin planning your day. At 8:30 I’ll kick off the keynote with a few brief comments and then we’ll move right in to the good stuff: talks from John Powell, John Newton, and Mike Farman.

The conference is at Prospero House, which is at 241 Borough High Street, which is just across the street from the Borough tube station, right next to Starbuck’s.

What a week we had in San Diego last week! I was so happy with how DevCon Americas went. Everyone I’ve talked to got a lot out of the conference, so thanks to everyone who attended, spoke, or helped organize and run the event.

The Hard Rock Hotel was a perfect venue in terms of location, size, and vibe. We did have some issues with wifi and A/V but other than that it was great. San Diego is a beautiful city. I was worried about the weather early in the week, but, as if on cue, the sun came out on Wednesday and it was just gorgeous outside. We ate lunch al fresco both days, which seemed appropriate.

We had a wonderful turnout from people all over the Americas and even some from Europe. I saw many people from the Alfresco community I’ve known for years and met lots of new faces. Our “purposeful lunches”, which assigned a topic to every lunch table, worked well–I saw lots of lively discussions happening over lunch and I know of several groups who are planning to meet again on their own as part of a local meetup.

The sessions offered something for everyone with some really cool case studies, some down-and-dirty technical sessions, and lots of useful lessons learned/best practices talks. I didn’t get to attend as many as I would have liked, but my favorites were:

• New York Philharmonic case study. In a nutshell: PHP front-end hitting SOLR fed by Alfresco. Alfresco houses scanned images of thousands of scores going way back in NY Philharmonic’s history. Have a look at the app here.
• New Client Config & Extension Points in Share. Remember when you had to perform major surgery on Share to hide parts of the UI or to add your own customizations? Some new constructs make that much easier. I almost started refactoring some of my code before the session was over.
• Share Document Library Extension Points. Document Library customizations were even more of a headache. Now simple things, like adding new properties to the document library list view, are handled through config. And if you want to do something more elaborate, like show more complex markup for a given property it is much easier to inject that without duplicating hundreds of lines of client-side JavaScript.
• Creating HTML5 Apps with Alfresco & SproutCore. I’ve only played with SproutCore on my own, hooking it up to Alfresco just to see if I could. So it was cool to see what Rothbury has done for a real project.
• Understanding the Solr Integration. I think I need to review Andy’s slides to digest this content fully, but I definitely have a much better understanding of how Solr fits in to the platform in Alfresco 4 and how customers will be able to migrate to it as it makes sense.
• Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design. It was good to see this app discussed from a technical perspective as well as understand what’s involved for people who want to contribute to the source code.

Claudia Saleh wrote more comprehensive wrap-ups on the SocialContent.com blog for Day 1 and Day 2 so check those out.

I almost forgot to mention there are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

On to London!

Now that DevCon Americas is behind us it is full steam ahead for DevCon EMEA next week in London. Many of the sessions I listed above will be repeated in London. I’ve got to try to get to David’s Cloud session, the talks on Drupal, Clojure, and Grails, and a couple of the Activiti sessions at the very least, so it’s going to be another busy week as I try to fit it all in.

If you are joining us at Prospero House next week, here are some things you might want to know ahead of time:

• If you are attending the optional training day, make sure you’ve registered and paid (the optional training day is an additional cost, separate from the main conference) and that you have installed all pre-requisite software on your machines, including downloading some rather large files. You should have received an email with these details.
• The main conference starts on Wednesday, November 9. You can pick up your badge as early as 7:00 and then enjoy some breakfast. The keynote starts promptly at 8:30.
• Our first night party is Wednesday night at Vinopolis, a short walk from Prospero House. There should be plenty of food so I would plan on spending your entire evening with us–there is no need to have dinner elsewhere.
• Similar to last year, the Alfresco Engineering Team will be offering “Office Hours”. This is a chance for you to get some one-on-one time with an Alfresco Engineer. Sign up for a time slot on-site using the bulletin board in Illuminate (where the sponsors are).
• We are offering on-site certification testing for a separate fee. You can sign up for an on-site certification test here. I’ve heard that if you previously passed the Recognized Developer test, you should be fine, but if this is your first Alfresco cert of any kind, you might want to start studying!
• We are making a slight change in the overall schedule based on feedback from San Diego. John Newton will be giving an additional keynote on Product Roadmap the morning of the first day. We will still have a Panel Discussion on the second day, but it is moving to 17:00. We are working to get the detailed schedule added to the registration site as we speak.
• Want to get your hands dirty? Spend some time in our hack-a-thon room. If you bring your laptop, we can help you get set up with Alfresco so that you can help test Alfresco Community, help clean up the wiki, answer questions in the forum, or write some code for Share Extras or other Alfresco community projects. Stop by the Discuss room on the First Floor for more details.

That’s it for now. I look forward to seeing everyone in London next week.

I mentioned this off-hand in my last blog post but thought it was worth calling out here: The DevCon San Diego Day 1 start time is 8:20am, sharp. That’s 10 minutes earlier than what we originally published on the registration site (to be updated with the correct start time shortly). This is not a clever ploy to get you in your seats for an 8:30am start. We’re honestly starting at 8:20. For the plan-ahead and early-riser types, this is no big deal. However, if you weren’t planning on rolling out of bed until 8:15am, you probably need to make an adjustment.

Wow, I cannot believe that time has flown so fast. DevCon is next week! Things are quite busy as the final odds and ends are getting resolved heading into next week. But one thing is for sure: Excitement is mounting.

When I was on the other side of the fence working as a consultant, conferences like DevCon were always energizing. I loved listening to engineers I respected so much talk about the product I was deeply-focused on. I loved the competitiveness of working hard to put together a talk that would hopefully fill a room with more attendees than my arch-rival. And, of course, I loved just soaking up the insights from other smart people pushing the envelope of the platform.

How many conferences have you attended where that one conversation you had with an attendee or a speaker or an engineer actually paid for the trip? It happens all of the time. At Alfresco we do a lot of webinars and other online events. And we’ll be recording a few of the sessions and making those available online after the conference (along with all of the session presentations). But I think there is value in an on-site conference that you don’t get in an online event. With an on-site conference you can get away from your desk and the constant demands of your inbox and take some time to focus on the techniques and approaches you are using on your projects. Freed from the hourly stresses of your project, and flooded with cool and interesting technical topics, you’re bound to have at least one flash of insight during the conference. I hope I get to see some of those “A-ha!” moments registering on attendee faces. That’s the kind of stuff that makes the effort to put on an event like this worthwhile.

Are you showing up early? Long-time community contributor, Ray Gauss, has put together a brewery tour for Tuesday night from 6:30 to 10:30. It includes transportation, two brewery tours, light apps, and a tasting. This event is separate from the conference so there is a cost involved, but that shouldn’t stop you. San Diego has some great local craft beers, so why not sample what’s on offer with some of your fellow Alfresco community members? Sign up at eventbrite. Remember, the keynote starts at 8:20am, sharp on Wednesday morning, so sample responsibly. Just saying.

The weather forecast for San Diego next week looks fantastic. Sunshine one day and “brilliant sunshine” the next. Still, you may want to bring a light jacket or a hoodie. We’ll be dining al fresco both days.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in San Diego. If you haven’t registered there are still spots available, so go sign up.