(A very late update on DevDays 2009 SFO. I am one lazy blogger)

In an unexpected twist of events, I ended up attending Qt Developer Days at SFO. I had just one week to get my visa, flight and hotel bookings in place, so I wasn’t too hopeful. Amazingly, I got my visa interview appointment in 2 days  and received the passport by courier in another 2 days! Also, the chennai embassy didn’t have any long queues that every indian so dreads. Either the U.S.A visa process has made giant leaps or it’s the downturn .

1. Sebastian Nyström talked about Qt being everywhere and that it was being used by Google, Skype et al. One of the slides showed a screenshot mashup of ‘cool’ Qt applications. I was pleasantly surprised to see Hyves Photo Uploader in there Slides here (slide 11, we have the highest z-order even)

2. Tapani Mikola mentioned the ‘death of widgets’ in one his slides when presenting QML. QML is awesome and the talk was excellent but I am a bit saddened by the ‘death of widgets’ phrase – as much as I like all the new developments, qgv is no where near providing all the ui elements required to develop applications on the desktop. Ask an app developer, he will give you many examples of widgets that Qt lacks. When was the last new widget that was added to Qt, that made you go ‘nice!’ or ‘finally!’? Maybe I am reading too much into the phrase

3. Meeting up with old friends made me really miss Norway and the oslo development team

4. Major shortage of Qt developers – I lost count of the number of people looking for Qt developers and consultants. The interest in Qt has exploded after Nokia has taken over. I have been in 2 dev days as Trolltech employee before and it was nothing like this. It was crazy, a few people had signed up for the conference only to hire more developers/consultants. Funnily, I even ended up getting two job offers with no interview! If you are a Qt developer and out of job, you are not looking at the right places. On the topic, we are still hiring.

5. Qt Certification at SFO didn’t see as much participation as munich, but Vladmir thought it was up to a great start. Roop and I are Qt Certified even

If you missed Dev Days, be sure to plan on being there the next time (the munich event was even bigger and had 700 delegates). If you want to keep up with the trends in Qt development, there is nothing like meeting the people who are making the change. You just cannot afford to miss these events.