The 7th edition of the UGIALT.NET Conference will take place in January. It’s a free, independent conference born after the ALT.NET movement, held twice a year usually in Milano and Bologna. It’s a very nice thing to have, also because attendees get to vote for the talks they want to attend. This year more than 50 proposals were submitted, for a total of 19 slots available, so that’s a huge result by itself.
I submitted my talk proposal on Windows Azure, and more specifically on how to build a simple Google Reader clone on Azure. The project would have allowed to discover all the major features of the platform, so I thought it would have been a nice fit.
To some surprise, my talk was not among the top 19. “OK,” I though, “perhaps it was too boring”. The problem is that none of the proposals on Azure were selected. Of course, they might have been uninteresting, boring, or simply less interesting than the others.
But then you have this:
The Learn Windows #Azure event at the Microsoft Redmond campus is completely full. However, you can still attend online bit.ly/t7IZzd
— James Conard (@jamescon) December 12, 2011
How can it be? Is it just that Italian developers don’t care about Azure? Or are they already experts? Or, perhaps, is Azure not “ALT” enough? More generally, how can a talk on Node.js* be more interesting, let alone useful, than one (not necessarily mine) on Azure? Have conferences become a way to hide ourselves from technical reality and learn things that are not that useful, but are funnier?
Perhaps it’s just this one conference that is weird, and it is to some extent because the voting system makes the agenda absolutely incoherent and spotty. I’ll keep my eyes open to see if the same Azure-is-boring phenomenon happens at other events in Italy.
*) Remember, it’s fucking JavaScript!