Alfresco's first annual developer conference is officially a wrap, and I wanted to get some thoughts out there while it is still fresh.  Overall this was one of the better developer conferences that I have attended, big or small.  I personally prefer smaller conferences, as they typically feel more productive.  At a huge conference like JavaONE or LotusSphere, it always feels like the ratio of attendees to presenters is incredibly unbalanced.  Good luck actually cornering one of the presenters if you have a specific question!  Alfresco's DevCon was exactly the opposite.  The Alfresco team was always out mingling and chatting with the crowd, which was small enough that you could actually find the person you needed and have a meaningful conversation.

There's a lot to be excited about with Alfresco.  One upcoming project that was discussed at DevCon is putting together a third-party components catalog for Alfresco.  Right now there is nothing like this available.  Alfresco community projects are scattered all over the place.  Some are in Alfresco Forge, some are on Google Code, still others are on developers' blogs (mine included).  I'm sure I'm forgetting a few locations, but you get the idea.  Rolling all of this up in one queryable repository would be a fantastic addition to the Alfresco community.  Aside from the component catalog, Activiti looks awesome, much easier for business analysts to use than jBPM was.  Replication actions, new Share features, the list goes on and on.  Needless to say I'm eagerly awaiting Enterprise 3.4.

Best sessions

A few sessions really stood out for me.  The first was Peter Monks' talk, "Alfresco Environment Validation and 'Day Zero' configuration.  It turns out that there are a few things I could be doing to get a lot more performance out of my Alfresco installation.  I'll be sure to post a link to his slides here when they are made available, it is great information for somebody that is setting up a new Alfresco installation or hasn't properly configured the one they have.  I knew the default configuration wasn't production ready in some ways (like the JVM settings), but some of the other tips Peter showed (especially around the DB configuration) were new to me.

Another talk that I found very useful was Neil McErlean's talk on the Custom Action Framework.  I've been wondering what some of the best practices are around custom actions, especially things like the naming conventions that Share uses to wire the action parameter names to the UI.  This is important to me so I can get the Alfresco PDF Toolkit working properly with Share.  Neil's talk laid it out nicely.  Another thing I liked about his session was the coverage of QR codes.  I had never heard of QR codes before, so getting to see them in action along with a good technical dive into the Custom Action Framework was an added bonus.

Gripes

The Alfresco developer conference was outstanding, but nothing is perfect.  My biggest gripes were the facility.  The wireless was constantly going up and down, and even if you had a connection to the access point, internet connectivity was hit and miss.  I had a few things I would have liked to share, but the spotty internet access made it impossible much of the time.  It's a developer conference.  We live online.  I think I actually saw a few people having withdrawal symptoms.  I understand that a DevCon where you have almost 300 people, most of whom have at least 2 wi-fi devices, can be a challenge, but it can be done.  Another issue was the lack of space.  Many of the sessions ended up standing-room only.

I was looking forward to the fireside chats (as seen in the Paris conference) and was disappointed to find that they had been removed from the agenda  That format has always been a personal favorite.  Some of the best insights come from the ad-hoc exchanges, and a fireside chat creates a great environment for this.  Thankfully one of the other sessions was cancelled and we got a good hour long Q&A with the entire engineering team instead!  Having the entire Alfresco braintrust in one room provided the opportunity for some developers and customers to get hard questions answered.  The Q&A session ran over its time limit, good evidence that more of this sort of exchange is needed next time.

Thanks to Alfresco for shipping out (almost) their entire engineering team for the conference, and to everybody for making it such a great experience.  See you next year!