Today concludes Nokia’s Qt 2010 Developer Days. As an attendee, I’d say the conference was a success. Like many conferences, this one was split into tracks and sessions. One track was dedicated to technical information and the other was full of people from the community demonstrating how they’ve used Qt to solve their problems. As someone new to Qt, I found the conference to be extremely valuable and informative.
The main conference is two days long, however they offer a pre-conference training day to those that are interested. This was probably the most valuable part for me. Unlike pretty much every person at this conference, I’ve never used Qt. I would have been lost for the main conference had they not offered the “Qt Fundamentals” training day.
I immediately found out it’s not pronounced “Q.T.” – it’s actually pronounced “cute”. This added a layer of hilarity to the entire conference – as I can’t count the number of times I heard the phrase “cute engineer” or “cute guy”.
The number of attendees this year was stated to be 650, which has more than doubled from two years ago. I don’t see any reason why the event won’t continue to grow and expand to larger venues.
The conference kicked off with a series of keynote addresses that was highlighted by Inder Sidhu – the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco – who presented “Doing Both” – an incredible insight into Cisco’s business philosophy.
Every session was informative and put together well. It might be because the same conference took place in Munich just a few weeks earlier, so they had time to iron out the wrinkles. The difficulty of most sessions ranged from beginner to medium-advanced. As for me, this worked out well, but I did talk to one other developer that wanted a little more in-depth information. Most presenters talked about the area of Qt they were actually developing, which made them extremely knowledgable for post-session Q&A.
There was definitely an emphasis on Qt Quick. Qt Quick is tailored for quick UI development for mobile devices. Nokia is moving entirely to Qt for their mobile phones, so it makes sense that they would invest heavily in this technology. At the moment, Quick is centered around QML, which is an impressively powerful declarative markup language.
Like every other conference I’ve attended, the most fun I had was interacting with other developers. I met several people from around the world and had a great time sharing what we do and how we use Qt. Nokia added an extra layer to this with “Dinner with the Trolls” (Qt developers are called Trolls). This was a dinner where the Qt developers were all spread out so pretty much everyone got to eat and talk with them.
The hotel that hosted the event did an incredible job – the food was great, the session areas were always clean, and the staff was exceptionally nice and helpful. It’s clear that hotel does its fair share of events like this. There was even a person that walked around playing a small Xylophone when it was time to start the next event.
I went from someone who never touched Qt to someone that can sit down and hammer out an app in a matter of minutes. Look forward to some tutorials on this site as I get chances to use the technology (especially Qt Quick). As for the conference, if you have a chance to attend in the future, I would highly recommend it.