Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending Monkigras, a developer focused conference organised by the Redmonk analysts.

Sessions

There were some excellent sessions, and it’s hard to pick out 1 or 2 as stand-out ones, but Networks of Data by Matt Buddulph was fascinating and probably the most relevant for my current project, and Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill from Joyent did an excellent CTO vs VP of Engineering talk, which really brought to life some of the issues of starting up, separation of responsibilities, and how to handle growing as an organisation.

John Appleby did a pretty brave talk, given that he was speaking to mostly a bunch of web geeks, discussing the importance of enterprise systems like SAP to large companies, and how we need to link these new technologies back to the core business systems to really make a difference to how companies operate. I certainly had no idea that SAP could talk to other systems using REST, RSS, etc, and I’m sure plenty of other people didn’t know either.

Socialising

The social aspect is a big part of these kind of conferences, I got a good chance to speak to some really interesting people, both those that I follow on Twitter, and those that I’m following now. Who knew that Cap Gemini are doing Drupal development?

Conclusion

I only got to spend one day at Monkigras before catching the last train home to Manchester, but it was an absolutely excellent conference, the best I’ve ever been too. Everything from the food, the venue, the sound quality, through to the speakers were absolutely top notch.

Well done to @monkchips and the other organisers and volunteers, and thanks very much to them all – here’s to next year!