Alfresco DevCon is back and it felt good. Perhaps it was the beauty and food of Lisbon, or the days of blue sky and sunshine that made everyone relaxed and happy. There was no doubt that the conference had energy, a buzz and a feeling of unity across our communities.
What's fuelling this energy? From talking with others at the conference it became clear that our renewed focus and vision for our Digital Business Platform are very much liked. And that is only more attractive when combined with our stronger alignment to cloud infrastructure such as AWS and our continued commitment to open source communities with ADF and Activiti.
This is precisely why we have re-ignited DevCon. It's only right for a platform company to have a venue for the developer community to get together.
I attended the pre-conference hack-a-thon (which ran parallel to certification training) where approximately 60 members of the developer community worked on 16 projects covering content, process, governance and ADF. These are fun days and of course there are always some offbeat ideas such as the Beer ordering process and the ever present, Minecraft integration. I would like to thank Angel Borroy and David Anton from Keensoft for inviting me to collaborate on exposing the Alfresco content repository as a Cloud Foundry service. It was a pleasure spending time and coding with you.
There was no shortage of content at the conference. Two full days of four tracks of presentations, lightning talks, BOFs, engineer 1:1s and keynotes. It was great to hear that half of the content was provided by the developer community. Some of my favourites included 'The Evolution of Alfresco’s Digital Business Platform' by Brian Remmington, 'Digital Business at McDermott' by Vagesh Dave, 'Resilient Alfresco – Prepare for Failure' by Boriss Mejias and John's keynote 'Impact of Emerging Technologies on Content' this time themed to Star Wars (at last). There were too many stellar performances throughout the conference for me to list here, so watch out for recordings of all presentations to be published soon.
Having missed all previous BeeCon conferences, I was struck by the passion and activity of the 'Order of the Bee'. One cool touch was their award ceremony where they recognised people for their contributions to the community. This is what the developer conference is all about - meeting, sharing, collaborating and moving things forward.
Personally, I gave two presentations both slightly off the beaten track. Thank you to those who attended and gave me positive feedback. Much appreciated. I think the selection committee consisting of Alfresco and Order of the Bee members did a fantastic and probably challenging job choosing and scheduling such a broad range of subject matter.
DevCon is very motivating and I can't wait to see the creativity and innovation at next years conference. Speaking of which, I'd like to suggest Stockholm to the organisers (a great city and tech hub, but cold and snowy in January).
Finally, thanks must go to everyone who organised, contributed and attended DevCon for making such a friendly and open conference. May the source be with you. Had to get that one in, sorry.
