Seriousely, the keynotes at GOTO are really good this year. Today was by Chad Fowler. It was about, as the title says, how to become accomplished. To me, Chad Fowler is like a motivational speaker for programmers, and he is really really good. 

In short, you are going to spend a lot of your life working, so why not do it good, love the process, accomplish some stuff on the way and be successful. Chad Fowler knows how to do that, he has an incredibly life story.

I really cant recap what the talk was about. Just go buy his book. You will not regret it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Passionate-Programmer-Remarkable-Development/dp/1934356344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380707932&sr=8-1&keywords=the+passionate+programmer

If you are in to motivationel stuff, you may know that life is the answer to the question we give our self. Chad Fowler had some question, you should ask yourself. I cant remember them precisely, but here is what I kind of remember 🙂

Are You Better Than Yesterday?

-> If not, then just be better 🙂

It is “Hell yeah” or no.

-> If it is not hell yeah, then it is no.

Ask Why you are doing what you are doing once a day.

There were some other good take aways, but I can’t remember them now. Just buy the book. But last take away.

Surround yourself with people who are better than yourself

So today was day 1 at the GOTO conference. Today none of the tracks related directly to what I work with daily, so I think I was around almost all the tracks for different sessions.

Solving Real and Big (Data) Problems Using Hadoop
So the first session actually was the only one, that related a litle to my work. I think approximately, once a year, a new technology is born in business intelligence land, which promise that it can replace the old enterprise data warehouse. This year it is Hadoop 🙂

I can understand why salespeople want to get that message out, because it is a good business case, since the development of an enterprise data warehouse can be expensive, and if you can replace it with something that is almost free, hey, why not.

But it is not going to happen, for many obvious reasons I don’t want elaborate on in this post.
However, Hadoop is really cool, and it can enrich many companies BI & DWH solutions(Not replace them).

I have seen a lot of presentations at different conferences and user groups about Hadoop, but the presentation by Eva Andreasson from Cloudera was the best so far, and she almost convinced me to buy the book “Definitive Guide to Hadoop” in the Factum bookstore.

Microsoft Devices and Services
As an old .Net developer, it is allways exciting to see what MS is up to. I attended 2 session from MS. “Windows Phone app development” and “Windows Azure Mobile Services”. One thing that amazes me, is how fast it is to develop to windows phone and all the azure things.

Reliving the history of multiplayer games
I also went to the session “Reliving the history of multiplayer games”. I don’t do game development myself, but hey, I do a lot of gamming. It was fun to see the presenters be so excited about games. My key take away: I want to work on something that relate to computer games in the near future 🙂

Taking The Hippie Bus To The Enterprise
My last session of the day. Again, not something I work with directly, but it is always cool to catch up with the trends in .Net land. A lot of code examples and overall a great presentation by Microsoft MVP Mogens from d60.

All in all, an exciting day.

I have not completely decided on my GOTO program yet, but here is a list of some of the sessions I’m looking forward to 🙂  Some of them are at the same time, so I really hope that they will be available on VOD afterwards.

Don’t be religious about the Internet of Things!
As an owner of a BI company, I have noticed that all of my competitors are talking about the internet of things, and yet, I still do not know what it is 🙂 So yes, I’m looking very much forward to this session, where I’m hoping to get at good introduction to the subject.

I have a feeling that it is somehow, someones view on big data, but from another perspective. I have tried to take a look at the comic book by The Alexandra Institute, but I’m still not completely sure about what it is.

The “Making sense of data” track
Well, the job description of every business intelligence developer, is properly to “make sense of data”, so I’m guessing this is a must 🙂

The track “Open Data / eGov“
A part of big data (In my line of work, it is important to say big data a lot these days), is to enrich a companies data warehouses with all kinds of market data. So all information about how to do that is welcome.

The NoSQL, MySQL and Big data track(There is that word again)
There is a trend at the current time, that make developers use no SQL databases. As a consumer of the data the developers applications create, I have to know there mindset behind this, so sessions about this, is also of big interest to me.

Well I guess that is it. Else I’ll just go with the flow, and get inspired by the people I talk to at the conference.

Back in my .NET developer days, like 100 years or so ago, I went to my first GOTO conference(Or JAOO as it was called back then). Back then, I loved .NET and anything that related to it, but that wasn’t the reason I went to GOTO.

If I wanted to know more about the changes from 1.0 to 1.1, it was proberly a MS conference I should have went to.

The reason for attending to GOTO, was to get inspired. Get inspired by all the different tracks, learning about what was going on with all the other languages and trends.

So, fast forward approx. a 100 year and a technology lane shift to a BI developer. Why should I go now??? Well, the same reason. If I want to know more about how the new indexes works in MS SQL server, or for instance the new in memory technologies from MS, other conferences offer that.

But my world changes fast, and a lot of new technologies are emerging, and even as a BI developer, GOTO still offers a lot of inspiration. All the next big things in my line of work, like Big data, the internet of things, no sql, open data, and a lot of other things, all has a track at GOTO.

BTW, If I haven’t mentioned it, I’m attending GOTO this year, and if you are like me, I guess I’ll see you there 🙂