FSCONS 2009

So, it is kind of stupid to write about these things afterwards, but the time before a conference is always filled with preparations and far too much time spent in OO.o Impress.

The last Saturday I attended FSCONS'09. This turned out to be another great event (I've been there two years now). I met lots of interesting people and got faces to a couple of names who's blogs I've been following for a while now.

My plan for this year was to do two workshops - one on Qt for Embedded Linux (which I try to focus on), and one on the Qt SDK, trying to get people started. Both these sessions turned into something else - probably due to the unclearness of what a workshop is intended to be.

The Embedding Qt workshop (slides) had a great turn-up. The idea was to go through the configuration process of Qt/X11, Qt/embedded targetted at QVFb and then have a look at the configuration and deployment of Qt for an actual embedded target. Given a 90 minutes slot, I knew that compilation time was going to be an issue. When it turned out that only one attendee wanted to give it a try, this session turned into an ordinary talk (the one brave guy gave up after the Qt/X11 build - thank you still!). However, the talk was great, lots of interesting questions and great feedback. I really enjoyed the interaction with the audience and at the end Knut Yrvin (an actual norwegian troll) showed up, adding even more facts to the discussion.

The Qt SDK workshop (too few slides to share) also had a great turn-up. My plan was to get people to install the SDK and then show them the basics. I think that something like 5-10 people actually ran the installer, so that was a great success. The demo, however, could have needed some more planning from my side. I showed signals/slots, some widgets and the concept of layouts. For that, I used 40 minutes of my 30 minutes slot, so there where loads of unaswered questions at the end (thanks for everybody coming up to me afterwards having a chat).

To summarize - my aim with workshops did not really work in this setting, however, the quality of the audience and the resulting discussions turned this into a great event for me. I hope that you liked it as well!