I never sleep well on the road. Going to the other side of the planet doesn’t help, but sometimes there are more important things to do than sleep.

The Great India Developer Summit provides plenty of them. It’s a four-day show, held this year at the National Science Seminar Complex in Bangalore, India. At the generous invitation of Saltmarch Media, I spoke on all four days of the conference, in the .NET, Web, Java, and Workshop tracks. I gave talks on Decision Making, Complexity Theory, Gaelyk, Open Source Business Intelligence, and Liquibase. I also gave three-hour workshops on Gaelyk and Liquibase.

This was my first time at an Indian conference and my first time in India. Sadly, a tight schedule and responsibilities from the office back home kept me from being able to enjoy Bangalore outside of the hotel and conference venue. However, just the conference experience was different enough from my normal to make it interesting all by itself.

The expo hall and speakers’ lounge were open-air, which made for a few warm afternoons, but made the tropical rain on Thursday and Friday that much more beautiful. Most remarkable to an American speaker are the huge posters placed outside of each lecture hall bearing the speakers’ names and session titles. This functions as a handy guide to the day’s activity in any given room—and an embarrassing one to boot. American conference speakers love being the center of attention (why else would we be conference speakers?), but we’re shocked and surprised when people actually treat us that way. There is an irony here.

Attendees at any conference tend to assign more honor and privilege to speakers than any of us deserves, but the delegates at GIDS took this to a new level. They really seemed like they were deeply honored to have us there, and were not at all shy about approaching speakers after a session to ask questions on any subject. They acted as if we were the sort of people whose faces you’d put on giant posters! This is probably just a difference of degree from the attention speakers get in US and European conferences, but it’s a remarkable difference nonetheless.

GIDS treats its speakers very well, having put us up in the beautiful ITC Windsor. I am a well-known sucker for a breakfast buffet, but a breakfast buffet with vada and coriander chutney makes that much more a fool of me. (There were some Western comfort breakfast foods in there too, like French toast and sausage. These were not ignored.) The staff was polite and helpful in the extreme, the wireless Internet functional, and the room beautiful. It was a fine home away from home for the week.

I’m glad to be home and back to a conference-free life for a couple of months (No Fluff notwithstanding, of course), but the experience was invaluable, and I hope I can repeat it in future years.

As an important aside, the name Saltmarch, which meant nothing to me before my trip, turns out to be something like the Indian Boston Tea Party. Thanks to my friend Venkat Subramaniam for that explanation.

A week ago I had the privilege of speaking at the 2011 Scandinavian Developer Conference. This was my second year at the show. The Friday before the conference, Matthew McCullough and I put on a one-day public Git training workshop in Gothenburg, which was very well received. It’s always fun sharing the stage with Matthew.

My wife also came along with me this time. Gothenburg isn’t known as a tourist town, but it’s still got a lot to offer a couple of Americans who tend to enjoy just about any European city. We enjoyed walking around town and getting outside town a little bit. She took a few hundred beautiful pictures as usual.

I gave three talks: NoSQL Smackdown, Database Refactoring with Liquibase, and HTML5: The JavaScript Parts. NoSQL Smackdown was standing room only, with probably 150 people in the room, which is always gratifying. It’s a hot topic, and the talk explains the landscape fairly well.

The bad part about attending conferences is that I can’t really attend them. There are paying work and writing projects that demand attention, so I can’t go to all the sessions I want. I did attend one, though, given by Anna Herting. Her talk, essentially an extended urge to remain calm about the awesomeness of Agile and focus instead on pragmatic ways to be successful, was excellent. She made two points about the perils of small teams that resonated with me in particular, mostly because I knew I’ve been guilty of both in the past.

First, Anna explained that a small team can freeload on the efficiencies of being small and get away with low-grade engineering practices while still delivering good results. For instance, the team might never refactor and never write tests, but they all know the code so well that they remain fairly happy and deliver value to customers anyway. This sounds a lot like Joel Spolsky’s Duct Tape Programming, which I was never convinced was a good idea. To be fair, meeting human needs (or “creating business value” as we often prefer to say) is the proximate goal of our vocation, and code craft is a close second, but this kind of entrenched sloppiness remains an accrued liability that will move disastrously from the balance sheet to the cash flow statement some sad day when the team grows or undergoes turnover. I’ve been there before, so Anna’s words stung a bit. In a good way.

Second, she talked about how a small team with lots of direct customer contact is in danger of becoming more aligned with the customer than the business. If customers constantly present critical issues directly to a small team of developers—with the customer-developer contact presented as high-touch service, or some such soothing excuse—then those developers may begin to make decisions that benefit the customer first and the business second. Again, this might not seem so bad, and to be fair, one might come to the conclusion that the customer’s benefit is always the business’s benefit. However, I’m pretty sure one would be wrong in that case.

There were great insights, and deserve to be spread wider. There was more to the talk than that, of course, but this is what hit me the most. I hope Anna keeps looking for opportunities to speak, even if she isn’t going to become an insane globe-trotting conference monger like Some People I Know.

In summary, the show was great, the food was great, the city was great, the people were great. It’s always a treat to catch up with old friends (although I definitely didn’t get to spend enough time with certain people) and make new ones. I certainly hope to be back in Gothenburg next year.