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GeeCON - the blog

Wednesday, 27 June 2012

GeeCON 2012 videos

Kevlin Henney giving his "Cool Code" lecture at GeeCON 2012.
Kevlin demonstrates how things can go wrong ;)

We have promised to deliver GeeCON 2012 videos fairly soon after the conference. A month and a half has passed and we would like to present you with the first batch of talks. We will continue to upload new lectures each week.

We would like to start with a BANG! The most desired talk - Kevlin Henney's keynote "Cool Code" is available for you on our vimeo channel. Along with that you can enjoy Peter Hilton's "Play Framework 2.0" talk.

Stay tuned for more videos soon. We hope you'll enjoy it!

Friday, 22 June 2012

GeeCON Satisfaction Survey Results Revealed

GeeCON data analysis center ;)
A month after the conference, we have looked into GeeCON satisfaction surveys that many of you have kindly and selflessly filled for us.

The dry statistics are as follows:

No. of responses
111
Venue
4.2/5
Food
4/5
Quality of talks
3.8/5
Atmosphere
4.3/5
Parties
3.9/5
Organization
4.4/5
University Day
3.6/5
Open Spaces
4.2/5
Overall score
4.2/5

How did you hear about us?
(Does not sum up to 100% because some people gave more than one answer, and the answers that appeared only once are not included)

friend
86
77%
user groups
17
15%
work
6
5%
partner's webpage
5
4.5%
Google
10
1%

Favourite answer*: Dzizas, nie pamiętam. Od 3 lat jeżdżę. (Hardly translatable, but let's try: Geez, how would I remember, it's my third time here...)

Are you satisfied?

Yes
103
93%
No
8
7%

Will you come next year?

Yes
76
68%
No
1
1%
Maybe
34
31%

Good to hear that even those (few) of you who were not satisfied with this year's GeeCON are giving us a second chance, stating that you might still come next year! Then again, every 'no' is a sign for us.

The top 5 best speakers, according to you are (speakers' scores have been counted by subtracting the sum of their 'worst speaker' votes from their 'best speaker' votes ;) ):
  1. Kevlin Henney
  2. Adam Bien
  3. Sam Newman
  4. Thomas Sundberg
  5. Andrea Provaglio
Kevlin Henney wins hands down, and his performance is best summarized with the following participant comment: Closing lecture was pure gold.

Suggestions and general comments:

About the venue: most of you seem to like the idea of having a conference in a cinema, but there were some complaints. Fist of all, we are aware that the lack of a cloakroom was an inconvenience. We will organize one next time, sorry about that! I guess after last year's heat nobody expected that people would be wearing jackets in May. We will also remember that most of you like to 'eat with two hands' and so will try to get more tables. As for the beer demand... we will see. Why not! :)

Most of those who participated in the survey would like the University Day to consist of hands-on workshops lasting the whole day instead of just longer, tutorial-style lectures.

Apparently, we exaggerated with the number of simultaneous sessions, making people feel that they were missing on something else. We hereby acknowledge this fact, together with the suggestions that sessions should be divided by subjects, preferably ones completely disjoint. It might be a good idea to create the schedule based on votes of people who want to see particular presentations/sessions.

Other important subjects that you raised:
  • student discounts
  • access to videos from previous GeeCONs: those are ready to see here
  • more men's toilets
  • fruit instead of cakes (and to that my female heart and 5 extra kilos applaud fiercely)
  • a hackathon (maybe instead of one of the parties?)

To sum this up

We are always aiming to provide the best GeeCON experience possible. Your input is very valuable to us an we cannot thank you enough for taking your time to fill in the survey. We would also like to thank for all the kind words you've sent us in the survey.

We are sending e-mails to those lucky that have won a t-shirt / free ticket for the GeeCON 2013 - make sure to check your inbox (and just in case a spam folder). There is a total of 6 of those.

Since writing a GeeCON review blog post is (or so we think) a major effort we have decided to reward each submission sent to testimonials@geecon.org with a t-shirt. Please send us your shipping address and the t-shirt size.

See you next year!!!
* Adam's favourite quote from the surveys is "Koko koko GeeCON spoko", which would be hard to translate as well

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

My goodness My GeeCON!

GeeCON audience
GeeCON audience.  © Szymon Pietrzak

GeeCON is almost a month away. We'd like to thank you all for positive feedback. Rest assured though - we will not turn a deaf ear to all the suggestions and / or complaints that some of you have voiced. We want all of you to have the best GeeCON experience so all your suggestions are very welcome.

Not all of you might have found their way to our official photo gallery https://picasaweb.google.com/geecon.org/GeeCON2012. We will continue adding more pictures there, so check back soon.

We'd like to make a summary of testimonials submitted to us (and the ones we've found on the web that weren't submitted*) for all of you to read and enjoy. If you still haven't sent us yours, please do so soon, the deadline is this Thursaday, 14th June. We will, of course, update the blog with all the reviews sent after that, but you might miss the opportunity for such a sweet t-shirt!

The links to reviews are listed below. Note that not all are in English. Use Google Translate at your own risk!

That's it for now! We will post a short summary of our survey in the following week, along with announcing t-shirt and free ticket winners.

* bear in mind that only the reviews sent directly to testimonials@geecon.org will take part in the competition to win a t-shirt

Friday, 8 June 2012

OneWebSQL workshop

Hey there GeeCON folks! It’s been a while since the last update, but there was a lot of stuff to wrap up. A survey and blog reviews’ summary is coming up soon - in the meantime you can still send your review to testimonials@geecon.org or fill in the survey for a chance to win a free ticket and a super-cool blue GeeCON t-shirt! If you haven’t received a link to the survey please contact us - we will send one to you.

In the meantime we have an interesting offer for you. At the e-point SA booth you could see a demo of their new O/R mapping framework. Those amazing folks have prepared a workshop for those of you who would like to take an in-depth look at OneWebSQL. You can get hands-on experience in using OneWebSQL for database access layer programming. The OneWebSQL Team will pay special attention to the differences in the application development between Hibernate and OneWebSQL. It will be a real treat!

The workshop covers mostly advanced programming topics, so you need at least working familiarity with Java database technologies: SQL, JDBC, JTA transactions, etc. You will work in a small group (max 10 people) for maximum interaction and knowledge sharing.

The workshop is scheduled for:
Warsaw, Poland on June 21st, 2012y at 17:00 CEST (UTC+2)

If you'd like to attend please make an e-mail reservation until June 17th at workshops@OneWebSQL.com.

*English speakers take notice - Workshop is in POLISH!*

Enjoy!