You might remember last year, ESRI for the first time allowed developers to give a talk on what they are working on at the DevSummit. I was lucky enough to be chosen to give my talk on using OpenLayers with the ESRI RESTful API. Clearly some things came to light after last years DevSummit. First off there were many more talks submitted than slots to give them. The demo theater was too small, it was too loud and was distracting because of everything else going around in the ESRI showcase. While everyone (including me) enjoyed the opportunity to listen to the talks, it wasn’t as good as an experience as it could have been.
It looks like ESRI is taking that to heart and at the 2010 ESRI Developer Summit, things will be different. There will now be dedicated rooms for the talks giving a better opportunity for everyone to hear the talks. They are going to try and sync the talks with the technical sessions so that you won’t have to miss one or the other. They are doubling the presentation slots so that there is more opportunity to hear great developer stories. Lastly they are going to allow community voting to allow the ESRI developer community to pick what we want to hear.
Clearly ESRI continues to focus on the Developer Summit and it would appear that it will continue to be one, if not the, best GIS Developer conference out there. I went back to the ESRI UC this year for the first time in a couple of years and was shocked at how divergent the DevSummit has become from the ESRI UC. If you want to learn how to develop with ESRI tools, the DevSummit is where you should be going and with more user talks, it will be better than ever.
James took OpenLayers out on the DevSummit wall of death and lived to talk about it.
