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Today, I feel humbled to experience another QCon London conference. It is the fourth time I have been involved, and I consider it the biggest event in my home town.

What were my favourite events and happenings at QCon?

• Meeting with the people and having inspired conservations about technology
• Meeting Wendy Devolder of SkillsMatter and discussing the Functional Exchange
• The Java Community Panel on Thursday afternoon with Stephen Colebourne, Ben Alex, Mark Little, Jerome Dochez and Patrick Curran.
• Twitter conversation with Alex Blewitt about the JCP, the future of Java
• Mark Powell’s evening key note on the Jet Propulsion Lab, which contains many Star Trek references
• Speaker’s dinner where I tabled with Mark Powell, Glenn Vanderburg and Kevin Henney and had a fantastic conversation about The Mote in God’s Eye and science fiction writers, TV, movies and books
• The speaker dinner’s at the restaurant Inn The Park
• Meeting individuals like Christian Kellner and Daniel Temme of TimoCom, Duesseldorf, Germany; Juan Germano of Core Security from Argentina; Gary Harvey of Trifork;
• Winning an Amazon Kindle 3 Wi-Fi bundle in a FuseSource prize drive!!! (Thanks to Matt Thayer) 
• Being asked questions about JCP, Future of Java
• Paul Albettele asked me about the future of Java / Scala. Should I learn Scala? Should I learn functional programming? Michael Klove also inquired about Scala’s future too
• Chatting with Googler Ade Oshineye and eavesdropping on his photograph tips to a fellow conference goer
• Meeting Simon Ritter on the Oracle booth and discussing the JavaFX 2.0 early access release and experiments there of
• Meeting Artifactory / JFrog folk again Yoav Landman, Shlomi Ben-haim and Talin,  et al

Listen to AudioBoo: Thank You QCon London 2011: It’s Been Emotional

What were my favourite sessions?

• Glen Vanderberg’s Clojure on the Web on Friday
• The second half of Rod Johnson’s Friday morning keynote: Things I Wish I’d Known
• The NoSQL at NetFlix on Friday morning by Siddarth Anand
• Musical singing and playing of a certain Roy Osherove: Team Leadership in the Age Agile (Thursday)
• Kevlin Henney’s talk Putting “Re” into Architecture (Wednesday)
• Gil Tene of Azul interesting talk about Java without GC Pauses (Wednesday)

What were the things I did not like this year?

• No being there for the whole thing, missing out Wednesday and Thursday mornings
• Dealing with Another Other Business during the conference
• Being so emotional after the event (always sad to have an ending)
• Domain Specific Language technical session should have been much better than it was
• Smaller scale conference party on Wednesday evening

See next year and best endeavours for the rest of 2011

Meanwhile here are some photos:-

Collecting the Amazon Kindle from FuseSource’s Matt Thayer

Standing with Ade Oschineye near the Google and Wolfram booths

Wendy Devolder of SkillsMatter (left) and Ben Shlomi-Haim

Geeta Schmidt of Trifork (left) and Floyd Marinescu of QCon (right)

The indefatigable Rod Johnson during his Friday morning keynote

London Agile User Group night at QCon London

I suppose nobody can tell any more lies now.

Photos from Creative Commons (cc) Peter Pilgrim’s Photostream on Flickr.com