To be fair I shouldn’t have attributed my comment about developer quality just to that particular event. It’s something of a trend I’ve seen across a number of events and business sectors in recent times.

I certainly saw value in Qcon for me but not enough to justify the cost involved remembering that I’d be paying for myself cos I don’t start with Betfair until next week (disclosure: Floyd and I had discussions about discounts but at the time I couldn’t make a solid commitment due to calendar fog, them’s the breaks). I’d have loved to have caught up with Werner Vogels not sure however that I would’ve wanted to do the discussions in the banking track. I’m sure that sounds a little odd until I mention that I have a lot of beer and back-channel chat with many of the people involved in the banking stuff.

In respect of Betfair, well it’s a different beast from the banking arena which is one of the reasons I’m interested in it. It’s worth saying that at least some of the tech you mention above isn’t stuff I would consider appropriate for Betfair’s problem-space.

Finally, Ewan, Nigel Warren and myself are “co-chairs” for NextNet so you can approach any of us about the AMQP stuff. Couple of things to say on this:

I’m probably going to setup something a bit more permanent for NextNet on Ning.

Ewan is pretty over-loaded right now so apply a load balancing policy when contacting “Next Net”

In respect of NextNet’s mission, it’s really about real-world experience, discussion of issues etc. I don’t think we want to have product pitches, benchmark discussions (mine’s bigger than yours!) etc. Demo’s then, could form part of some overall presentation perhaps on some cool messaging solution deployed in the real-world but I’d say demo’s should almost be an aside or something for beer and pizza time. Imagine a good NextNet meeting to be maybe like reading a good paper on swarm algorithms or utility computing infrastructure and challenges or quorum algorithms or parallels in biological and distributed systems but with interaction and discussion.

I was in the building next door attending QCon. The quality of discussion was very high, at least in the Banking Architectures track that I attended, and people were focussed on the issues in building large scale distributed systems using tools like Javaspaces, grid computing, guaranteed low-latency JVMs and implementations of the AMQ Protocol.

When you consider your new role at Betfairl you really should have been at QCon. I think you would have enjoyed it more.

Hmm…Maybe we should talk to Ewan about getting the AMQP guys to demo their implementations at a NextNet evening?

The average level of skill in IT is lower now than it was 10 years ago and the drop in formalism and computer science is even greater. Then again…. Consolidated.java…..