It’s almost two weeks ago that PfCongres was held and now I finally have the time to write my experiences down. For me personally, PfCongres was my first experience with speaking at a conference. My talk was about Introducing Quality Management from a practical point of view. Since I was one of the first speakers of the day, I skipped the keynote session by Michelangelo to prepare. I was very nervous going up the stage, but at some level I also felt comfortable on there. I think it went very well, considering it was the first time, also judged from the joind.in comments from some of the attendees. The talk lasted about 30 minutes but after that there were a lot of questions from the audience and I had time to answer everyone. It was the kind of feedback I had hoped for from the audience and it made the talk more valuable for everyone including me.
After my talk was done I decided to skip the next two sessions untill lunchbreak. There was enough to talk about in the so called “hallway track” and it was great to have the time to talk to some people some more. After a great lunch I attended the talk about SPL Data Structures by Jurrien, which was a bit hard to follow. Maybe that was me though, because he somehow lost my attention farely quickly. I guess I was too tired to really focus and give him the attention that he deserved, because he did a great job! Next up was the session about 15 MySQL pro tips and after 5 minutes I already learned something new. Joshua did a great job at entertaining the audience and gave really usefull and practical tips.
After a short break there were another two sessions to choose from, but again I choose for the hallway track to hang out with some friends. Ofcourse I attended the closing keynotes from Starapple (the main sponsor) and Zeev Suraski. It was a long day for me and to close it all of, we had a great dinner at an italian restaurant in Utrecht. This first speaking experience was really great and I’m thankfull to the PfCongres organisation that they gave me this opportunity. I now have the confirmation that speaking is really something I enjoy and like to do more often. So untill the next conference, as speaker or attendee!