Tomorrow, Tuesday 14th February is the start of Dev8D 2012. A three day event for developers working in UK Higher Education. Which I am not really one, but don’t tell anybody and we should be ok. It’s an event that is on steroids : last time I went, my brain was pounded with more information to digest in 30 minutes than I would normally expect to receive in an entire day. It’s also bloody fantastic. I’m chuffed I can go this year.

The organisers have once again predicted the sessions I would like to attend and deliberately made sure they all clash. The Government should put a stop to this. Last time I tried to counter this by walking between the sessions of interest hoping to benefit from both. This did not work.

Had I mentioned I’m not a developer? Yes. But I’m very aware that whereas developers a few years ago were talking LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python), they are now talking almost anything but. The OS is of almost zero importance, so too is the web server (unless it is node.js it seems), MySQL is the uncool in the corner while hipsters MongoDB, CouchDB, Solr and Redis are on the dance floor, meanwhile never-cool PHP has become uncooler, perl has been forgotten, Groovy, Ruby (on Rails, of course), Scalar, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure and R are where it’s at. This article from Simon Willison sums it up nicely. If I walk away with half a clue as to what some of these technologies are useful for, and how I might use them, then job well done.

Anyway… My Plan:

• Tuesday morning: Python. But I also want to attend the Git thing, and HTML5 looks to be interesting
• Noon: Getting Ready to build location aware apps, AND/OR CKAN (a data portal)
• PM: Consuming Linked Data, but also really want to hear about Redis.
• Wed Am: Javascript and Jquery (I confess I now can’t really do the former without the latter), but Moodle plugins are also calling my name.
• data.*.ac.uk panel could be good (as I run data.lib.sussex.ac.uk)
• PM: CoffeeScript.
• Thurs Am: Ebook/epub technologies, but also XCRI (a standard for course descriptions) could be useful
• Pm: Visualising your Data Surgery, and then Indexing and Elastic Search.

I am also expecting to consume: (a) Beer (b) Gin. And maybe even interact with people in some sort of attempt at (a) being social (b) networking. If you see me there, say hi.

PS it is against the rules to quiz me after the event about any of the items above.