Qt Developer Days 2009

Before i start, i would like to appologise for the lack of pictures in the following blog entry. Please accept it as a testament to the extreme level of niftiness of DevDays that i completely forgot to take pictures

The 2009 edition of the Qt Developer Days started out in great style with a really nice, if decidedly business-ish (not really my style, but understandable considering the target audience of the conference and such), party at the Hilton Munich Park. More or less standard reception style, and sponsored by Tieto, which is a huge company, i'd never heard of before - but now i have! Apparently a good 16000 employees spread out over the entire world. Funny how large the world is that things like that can be entirely unknown to you. The party had lots of finger food, and beer, wine and soft drinks on tickets, and lots of pleasant people and similarly reception-styled (i.e. relatively short lived but lively) conversations with people such as Jean-Baptiste of VLC fame. The Gluon contingent left party at around ten, to prepare for the next day, the start of which was planned to be half an hour earlier than normal during the sprint due to needing to get to DevDays and get registered.

The following day started nice and early with breakfast and getting to DevDays again, where it was much fun finding out where i should be registering. Because of my full name being Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, it took a while to figure out that i should be in the T queue. So, not the last surname, and not the first surname... but rather the second one. That's logic for you Oh well, if that is the only gripe about a convention, then there isn't much to gripe about - and this is the case here, so wooh!

After registering we all went for the keynotes, which were spectacularly good - a well rounded and very different set, all the way from the very marketing-heavy "We are so great, and our greatness is only exceeded by the greatness of our greatness!" styled presentation of Sebastian Nyström (please take this in the most positive manner - it was a really great pep-talk in exactly the right place and time), to the rather technical presentation (including code and everything) by Mattias Ettrich.

After lunch i and Jure hooked up with Knut Yrvin, with whom we spent most of the beginning of the afternoon. The reason for us doing this rather than attending talks for example was that Knut and i had to put together the outline for an article he had to write about the Gluon developers' sprint. So, we sat in the lobby for a couple of hours writing some of this, and then ended up having a long talk which somehow went from open source politics and ended up in world war II... without me noticing any real transition happening. At any rate, it then later became time to stop talking - plus Knut had to go and have a nap, to get ready for his presentation later on that day.

That meant it was time to go back to the con proper. In my case it meant actually attending some talks. First one was the Qt on Maemo talk, in which was shown how well Qt integrates into Maemo 5. Spectacularly well as it turns out! The menubar is automatically turned into a proper Maemo 5 style menu and the widgets all look native. Very swish! Afterwards it was time for Nokia, Qt and the Internet, in which the Common Web Runtime was presented. Now, this is something i'm a little weary of. My problem with it is that it seems like something a web developer has thought up. To my eyes at least, it seems... Somewhat displeasurable. i'm sure it has it's place, but i'm not particularly impressed. However, the presentation itself was well paced, and even with a little techy friendly code demo, so it wasn't all bad.

After this i went onto the balcony where i ran into Bart from the Amarok team, who had been up all night and was hanging out with the Forum Nokia people. He was showing off Amarok 2 to them and we all got to talking about the visions for how Amarok would fit on Maemo, such as an entirely new UI based on Qt's new declarative UI system, while keeping most of the backend intact, which will be possible due to the strongly decoupled backend). While i was there, i took the time to also shortly mention Gluon's vision of creating a distribution system for games which would work amongst other things on Maemo 5 and ahead (e.g. anything that has Qt and OpenGL or OpenGL ES). More on that, of course, will come later - the vision document is being prepared, and will be presented to the world in a more official manner once it's in a state of relative readiness.

Two very important traditions at DevDays are the Troll Happy Hour and Troll Dinner. The first is a rather straight forward drinks type party - standing of course, to encourage moving around and networking, proper corporate style and though executed in a very professional manner by the Hilton personnel also very pleasant and get-togetherish. The second is an entirely more involved matter. A proper sit-down dinner, with lots of different dishes plus desert,during which also took part one of the more important events, named The Annual Fact & Crap Showdown. This is a competition in which the table has to answer a number of questions - this year 24 - of varying difficulty about Troll related items. This year's price was an N900 for every person at the table - a worthy price for any competition! Unfortunately we didn't win. However, we made a good, solid attempt! 19 correct answers out of 24 asked. So, while we went home from the party N900-less, it was still really funny and a great experience in general. Also: Tasty food and good company makes all winners

The day after started directly into an explosion of activity. Having talked with a few of the others about possibly attending the Qt Essentials exam the day before, we talked with someone, who i honestly cannot remember who was (please tell me if you remember ), who suggested that we should try talking with Knut or Alexandra about possibly getting sponsored tickets. So, Dirk and i went around trying to locate them, and ended up upstairs with the certification people, who told us that no, they didn't know. But they did know where Vladimir Minenko, the man at Qt responsible for the certification programme, was - in fact, he walked into the room immediately i asked. So, i was introduced to him, and my query presented to him. He asked me to hang around for a bit and meet him downstairs after a little.

When he came there about five minutes later, he told me to round up every KDE person i could find, and that they were all getting a full, 100% discount on the at-DevDays exam. Suffice to say, Dirk and i went into activity overdrive, running around to find every KDE person we knew, and asking them to pass on the word. Half an hour later we'd found fifteen people, roughly, and we gathered upstairs to register for it. Over the course of the next couple of hours, until around three o'clock, we all went through the exam, and we are now waiting for the email with the results along with everybody else.

One of the extra little perks that went along with the exam was the chance to win one of two N900s, and the first of them was drawn live in the big aula area just before the final presentation. Another couple of competitions were drawn there as well: A beagleboard by KDAB, an iPod Touch by Tieto, and a t-shirt by Nokia for filling out the Qt Ambassador programme survey. During this we were all taught about a small known effect of statistics called the Birthday Effect: Sandro from the Gluon team won both an N900 and the t-shirt. He was so surprised at winning the first time that he didn't even realise that he'd got the second until someone told him

In general, there was much talking about the Gluon distribution system, and eventually it was suggested that i should approach Nokia, Qt Developer Frameworks in a more official capacity, suggesting them possibilities for cooperation on the topic. So, while waiting for the information i've asked the Gluon sprint participants to send to me to roll in, another important thing to work on is a more formal description of the process, specifically a vision document.

Game concept of the day: I Qt Coffee - Make sure there's enough coffee and warm cocoa for all the Qt developers
Final point: Make sure to ask Sandro for lottery numbers!