I'm not sure what you mean by communicating through "status messages". It doesn't seem like a good way to operate. Posts are not limited in the same way as Twitter messages. You can add various attachments, and create messages longer than 140 characters. In most companies email is the dominant form of communication and other tools (including discussion boards etc.) just don't get uptake because people drop back to email.
In very big companies (> 20k) there is more of a need for a tool that that can connect people in different "silos". I've seen how Yammer has helped people in this type of organisation.
There were likely considerations that fed in at different levels of the process:
1. Higher-ups who still believed that they could offer a platform that would be more valuable than the internet at large. Hailstorm always felt like an AOL for web services.
2. Lower down in the MS hierarchy various areas were under pressure. They had technologies built on COM and Win32 that had been thrown together quickly as a response to the growth of the web. eg. IIS and COM+. Both had problems in terms of scalability (and security as exploited later) and there is was no way to improve performance without jumping down to C++. Obviously there were a lot of other issues with these tools and a "rewrite" was needed.
Microsoft were really playing catch-up here and "copying" various things from the JVM ecosystem such as garbage collection was required. It is worth reviewing Brian Harry's note re: reference counting. A large number of developers were concerned with the implications of this change but it was for the better (for more people - there is still no perfect solution here). C# appears to the uninformed to be a mere copy of the Java language but Microsoft included features to attract some C++ developers, help the transition, and improve usability over Java. SOAP is an abomination, but it is still better than DCOM which came before.
I think Rotor was one of the most valuable things that Microsoft produced in the early years of .NET. Ted Neward et al wrote a book on it with O'Reilly and an unpublished 2nd version is at http://callvirt.net/blog/post/SSCLI-20-Patch-for-VS-2010.asp.... You may not want to look at Rotor if you contribute to Mono-based projects.
> Moving on, even though I didn’t pay for my ticket since I was a speaker
I've attended PyCon a few times and found the experience to be great value. I believe their speakers have to pay their own way just like other attendees. Other events that I've attended such as TechEd appear to be a bit of a "jolly" for speakers (MVPs) who are carted around to other events throughout the year.
I think you can go further than that. To get people asking for your time as a consultant you have to demonstrate experience and get close to vendors who already support clients you are interested in. For example, targeting a niche "big data" problem with a particular tool, and then developing a relationship with the community supporting that tool. That gives you access to the people who are looking for consulting.
I miss the simplicity. For better or worse lobbyists are part of the US political system that won't go away any time soon. The "right to petition" is granted under the First Amendment. The intent was probably different from the reality, especially in regard to access to government for individuals. Lobbyists seem to be the gatekeepers, and only corporations can pay the fees.
When it comes to individual action many people are protective of things that are not necessarily in their best interests. Anything that threatens the freedom of the individual trumps everything else even if the alternative is slightly better. This happens with healthcare reform, to corporate taxation, to individual taxation (where people want to keep the status quo just in case they "get rich").
PyCon has some great ones although they were a little disappointing this year. A combination of the hotel layout and placement of the openspace proposal (sign up) board was not great.
I agree. The BOFs were often VERY hard to find, plus they were what felt like a 10-minute walk from the hotel lobby. I tried locating a few that I was interested in but didn't have much success.
PyCon 2012 was my first geek conference and left me a little disappointed.
Please post more about why you feel this way. I know that Jesse Noller and some of the other organisers would be interested in feedback from first time attendees.
Almost 10 years ago work sent me to TechEd 2002 EMEA in Barcelona. I remember a party with Cirque du soleil (or a similar) troupe, and a Ballmer-like break dancer. Everyone was driven over to the event at one of the former Olympic venues. There was booze and loud music but it a fairly good event even if you weren't drinking.
Do people really go to programming conferences for keynotes? My experience has been that the hallway conversations are alone worth more than keynotes.
Many keynotes sessions tend to be disappointing because there is not enough time to dive into technical details, or the presenter is not sure if they should be focusing on the movement as opposed to their technical contributions.
I go to conferences I've attended before because of the hallway track. But that won't get me to attend a new conference, because I don't know if the hallway track will be any good yet.
