Decoding Conference Presentation Titles For Busy Developers

Have you ever hesitated which session to attend on a multi-track conference?

Here is a short guide that should help you quickly figure out what to expect on a presentation, just judging from the title 😉

Foo Bar and Beyond (or The Future of Foo Bar)

Expect lots of history of Foo bar, slides with a timeline, and a little or no statements about the future. But at least, you will leave the room assured that “Foo bar is moving forward”.

What Is New in Foo Bar 2.0

Agenda:
1. Old Foo bar API sucked
2. We wanted to change it and had a lots of discussions
3. Early preview of new API, with multiple protective statements from the stage that what you see is not yet approved and subject to change (but really cool, indeed)
4. Release date unknown

Live coding session

You will learn how to change font size in an IDE.

In general, the session will assure you that it is still impossible to create an application in half an hour and your work still makes sense.

Foo Bar Anti-patterns

Even though this will be sad presentation, people will laugh every time new anti-pattern is presented.

Unfortunatelly, some of the anti-patterns will be close to your heart. At least hopefully you will learn some cool names for them.

Discussion Panel

Invited speakers will be answering each others questions, hardly ever looking at the audience.

Advanced Foo Bar

Special type of a discussion panel (see above) held in Chinese. The presenter will be either debating with himself or with a small group of Foo bar fans.

Is Foo Bar Dead?

Agenda:
1. Foo bar’s initial success
2. But… there are several issues with it
3. So… is it dead?
4. Real part of the presentation
5. Conclusion: Foo bar is not dead – we just have to care more!

Foo Driven Development

This talk will go beyond TDD practices, which for sure you are doing, but… “TDD is not enough”. There are other xDD’s and you should follow all of them, especially FDD, which provides you yet one more layer of safety (and one more test case to re-write for every small change).

Foo Bar For Busy Developers

Probably a simple tutorial, cause the presenter is a busy person too and had little time to prepare. The title is adjusted in order to attract more people (who is not busy these days?).

If you are really busy, do the tutorial from the website instead.

Other

If a talk does not fall under any of these categories, I do encourage you to identify a new pattern and comment on this post :).

Also, beware that if it is hard to figure out what will be the content, the talk might be a sponsored presentation :evil:.

Enjoy your next conference!
-Paweł

PS Thanks to Michał Ostruszka for the blog post title suggestion.