JUDCon India post-mortem

JUDCon India is finished now and I was hugely impressed with what I saw in the conference. First of all, it was by far the biggest crowd I’ve seen in a JUDCon event so that’s excellent news. The more, the merrier :)

The attendants have been excellent and in general I felt that they were paying more attention than in conferences in other countries. This is partly because hardly any attendant had their laptops open while listening to the presentations. They simply had a notebook and a pen or pencil and they were taking just notes. I wished this would happen more often in other conferences. Hmmm, time to ban laptops in non-interactive presentations?

I ended up doing 4 presentations, 3 of them in Infinispan related topics and 1 talking about JBoss Polyglot. Of all, the one that I felt attracted the most attention was the one on near caches. I got a lot of positive feedback from attendants and very interesting questions at the end of the presentation.

In terms of organization, it was impecable. Wifi worked like a treat with around 7 access points, 3/4 of which you could join from any place in the conference. Food was good as well, if you like Indian cooking of course :). As I already said on Twitter, the toilets were…​ interesting for a westener :).

Finally, I must congratulate the organisers on the method used to motivate attendants to provide feedback on the presentations. To get the JUDCon t-shirt, attendants needed to fill in feedback forms for all presentations they had attended, and once the last presentation had finished, they could go and claim their t-shirt once they’d handed over the feedback forms. I thought this was a fantastic idea to increase the amount of feedback received. So, well done to organisers! Looking forward to reading the feedback now.

Just landed in Delhi and now waiting for my colleague Rado, who’s arriving in a later flight from Bangalore. It’s time now for a couple of days off and doing a bit of touristy stuff around here. Plenty to see and do in the next few days with the Republic Day military parade, visit the Red Fort, Taj Mahal…​etc.

Cheers, Galder