In the admin pages of this blog (when I first started writing this post, five months ago!) I have a 'list view' for posts which has a few pertinent details alongside the post title - notably date and visibility (published or draft). In pages thirteen to four (twenty per page), covering July 2003 up until June 2007 all the posts are at status 'published.' On page three, starting about August 2007, there were a couple of posts at 'draft', on page four there were six, on page one, even with the couple of posts I finally published in January, there were seven. There's a definite trend developing here

There are a few factors at work here: a major one is that last year I switched from never going to the gym to going five or six times a week meaning that not only did I go to events less often but I had less free time to write them up; getting paid to write articles also decreased my motivation to write 'for free' - plus after spending a week or so where my entire evening (up until the early hours in the morning several times) had been spent writing I did feel like I owed myself some time off.

This led to me starting a number of 'place holder' posts and, once I had a few posts sitting in draft status it was very easy to leave the next one in draft too and say to myself "I'll finish them all off at the same time." What this led to is a whole mountain of unpublished, half-finished posts which eventually put me off even starting new ones.

I read some advice on another blog about not writing things out straight away - hold off seven days and see if it's still worth writing about. For me this just led to not writing anything at all (this may have been the effect he was after). If I'm going to write posts and keep writing them, I've got to do it that day, right there and then, and get it published. It turns out that getting paid to write stuff actually puts me off writing for free on my blog (other than a short burst of activity as the first thing was published just to make it look a bit more up to date).

So, in an effort to clear the decks, I'm going to attempt to summarize 18 months of event attendance in just a few long posts, then delete all those draft posts and make a fresh start. I did manage to spit out some blog posts in this period and I'll link to those where appropriate. The final part of this exercise will involve me finally publishing the few 'technical/tutorial' type posts I have in draft status which I'll then link to from a short post.

Autumn 2007 / Winter 2008

• Going Beyond REST - This was a fascinating talk. Applying the principals of REST architecture on the inside of a system rather than between systems - all functions are represented by URIs, which it turns out has some nice side effects. For instance if one process within the system calculates 2+2 then the result is cached and any other process gets to use the result 'for free' (I know this is hardly significant for 2+2, but imagine a collection of more complex calculations). This means recursive stuff can be automatically optimised - the results of each iteration are cached and so the minimum number of operations are performed. As I was listening to this talk, Greg Egan's Permutation City kept popping in to my head.
• Know IT and Share IT - This was an evening about how to go about facilitating enterprise knowledge sharing: "What knowledge do you have and where is it? Employee minds: 85%, Other media: 15%." Three talks on the themes of social network analysis, knowledge networks, communities of practice and tools to support it. A quote I noted down from the final talk which resonated with my experiences: "Any solution which requires significant change in behaviour will be difficult to implement. Any solution which requires significant consistent behaviour will not be possible."
• Erlang for five nines - Since I've found a video I won't go on about it, but a good introduction.
• London Perl Workshop 2007 - Attended the 'Beginners Perl Tutorial' Dave Cross which was quite enlightening - certainly an explanation of the default variable made a whole load of code suddenly more comprehensible to me (slides).
• Javascript as a disruptive language - I went to this mostly because I enjoyed Ajax in Action so much. Again, you can see the video yourself so I won't go on about it.
• Momolondon February - Mobile Operating Systems - four talks on the current state of mobile operating systems. Mark Burk's talk was interesting as it showed the strong divisions between the US phone market and the rest of the world, also notable the lack of penetration the iPhone had on the world market despite all the hoo ha. David Wood of Symbian takes the in retrospect prize for his strong defence of the closed source development model for mobile OS development (though misrepresenting several aspects of open source in is argument) only for Nokia to open source Symbian five months later.
• Momolondon March - Mobile London - Excellent venue at the London Transport Museum for this event focussing on mobile apps for Londoners. Some of the trials LUL had been conducting with audio travel guides and travel news while actually in underground stations looked very interesting, also the trial to add Oyster payment functions directly into your mobile phone. The "Huh!?" moment of the evening was provided by the O2 marketing person who claimed (with a straight face) that customers thought it was really important that they could always see the O2 branding on their phone display - yes I just love having 20% of my screen taken up by the operator logo...

Spring 2008

• BCSNLB - Discovery the Next generation - five talks on search, on the internet and in the enterprise. Ken Tombs talked about how there will now only be incremental improvements in search technology and the big wins in the future will be in making sense of the huge amount of data, he talked about search engines which could determine the sentiment of a document (eg. angry, happy etc.) and also Leximancer. Next up, Vicki Lemieux talked about using search technology to determine the business context of risk in documents, with potential savings of £50k per case. Aurélien Dubot then talked about best practices in enterprise search, one of his points being that, contrary to many traditional Enterprise CMSs, you need to be able to provide useful content without having an underlying taxonomy. Duncan Ash then talked about discovery in email systems, a crucial task in many modern businesses as so much knowledge is sitting in mail servers. Finally, Simon Bain discussed desktop search.
• Momolondon April - Mobile User Experience - Four talks on usability on mobile devices and the special challenges presented by designing for not only constrained devices but also such a wide variety of them, check out the presentations at the linked post.
• OnAIR London - I did manage to get my posts about this event out, though not in an entirely timely fashion, see my review of the morning sessions and the afternoon sessions
• London Web Week 2008 (link defunct) - Attended three events all of which I managed to post about: Microformats vEvent; Web Standards Group Findability Meetup; In the Brain of Peter Elst: The Evolution of the Flash Platform & ActionScript 3.0
• Building and ROI-based GIS Business Case and Strategy - This was more of business and project management focussed talk than a technical one, the methodology described could be easily adapted to other scenarios though.