So I’m back from RIT2007 which took place April 16,17 in Moscow,Russia.
The conference was well organized, while the conference center was a bit small for event – halls were jam packed during the breaks and there was limited sitting available for many sessions.
It was great to see attendees from almost all serious Internet Technologies players among attendees and speakers – Yandex, Rambler, Mail.ru all were quite well presented and there were a lot of people to talk to and large number of interesting talks.
The conference was quite diverse in presented topics which made it yet more interesting for person with wide range of interests as me – there were talks starting from very technical such as FreeBSD kernel tuning, Web QA or AJAX Development, number of Project Management focused talks, Investment related talks (both for ones looking for investments and looking to invest) and even Search Engine Doorway creating tutorial.
I’ve got so many questions so I had to skip number of presentations I originally was hoping to visit, and I almost lost my voice after first day of the conference.
The session schedule was too packed in my opinion. Sessions were running by 30 minutes (3 sessions in a raw without breaks) with 15 minutes recommended for talk and 15 minutes for questions. Also you could not get your computer on the speakers table neither you had remote control so you had to say “next slide” all the time which was a bit inconvenient.
As you guess you can’t tell much about MySQL Performance Optimization in just 15 minutes so I had to keep it to very basics while trying to balance it and include some non trivial stuff as well.
I also found Russian language is more elaborate than English so I spent more time talking than I originally planned.
Andrew Aksenoff, author of Sphinx was to speak about Sphinx but he got badly sick few days before the conference so I had to do this presentation as well. I must say speaking with someone else’s slides is much harder than using your own.
After the conference, 18th of April I had 1 day training/master class which had about 40 people which is more than I would expected. That was first time for me speaking 8 hours in a row, without breaks (which were used just to ask me more questions),
before that I did 3 hours presentations max.
I’ve published slides for 3 sessions I and Andrew wrote specially for this conference on MySQL Presentations page.
Next week I’m going to MySQL Users Conference to have some more fun 🙂
