Wen's Blog: Who? Wen!

Booth duty isn't always the most glamorous job as half the time you're sitting/standing wondering why the expo hall is open when all of the conference attendees are actually attending and learning in sessions.  Then lunch happens.  Suddenly, every booth, including the tucked-away booth staffed by the lone recruiter gets swarmed with developers looking for shwag or wondering why XYZ company is at a PHP-related conference.  Mostly it's about the shwag.

Then I remember why I like attending developer-centric conferences: most developers are willing to listen to your  spiel *and* aren't afraid to give their opinions.  So far, of the booth tours that I've done this year, ZendCon has certainly been my favorite.  Maybe it was the smaller size (~750 attendees) or the stronger community feel, or both, the developers that came to the Sun booth, lured by the possibility of a free SDN water bottle, often stayed to hear what we had to say about our technologies.  They were also just as fun to talk to as a few of them worked for large/traditional companies that I wouldn't have guessed had adopted an all open-source (and even cloud) solution.

Since I am a NetBeans guy, I spent most of the time talking about the new PHP features in 6.5.  In between demo'ing NB, I also got to show off OpenSolaris + Web Stack running on VirtualBox, and was glad to learn that over half the developers I spoke with were aware of OpenSolaris and VirtualBox.  Quite a few were even using VB (and liked it).

Of course, I've been at enough conferences to have faked interest in a demo just to get shwag, but since they'd already gotten the water bottle and had no reason to stick around, I'd like to believe that most of the developers stayed (and asked questions) because they were genuinely interested.   The best part was a few of them came back the next day to tell us they tried out NB, liked it, and even had feedback