Ask HN: What is the best developer conference talk you saw in 2011?

That's easy : Simple made easy by Rich Hickey

Strangeloop - great speakers (including my favorite keynote in years by Rich Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy) and great variety (https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions). I'm also happy that all of the presentations will (eventually) be available on the web (https://thestrangeloop.com/news/strange-loop-2011-video-sche...).

I'll definitely be attending in 2012.

One of the most inspiring talks I saw this year was Sarah Allen's talk about teaching programming to kids: "Easy as Pie" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Easy-as-Pie-Teaching-Code...). A month later I found myself teaching my first programming class to kids and I'm hoping to do some more early next year.

Of course. Strange Loop 2011.

Strange Loop 2011, "We really don't know how to compute", Gerald Sussman (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...).

That's not entirely fair though, insofar as I'm a sucker for a Sussman talk.

Beyond that, I'd have to say Sam Aaron's Overtone presentation @ Clojure Conj 2011.

At the moment, it strikes me that the obvious common element of both talks and speakers are their absolutely infectious enthusiasm for their respective specialties.

Coincidentally I was asked I put together one of those "top 15 of 2011" lists for .NET magazine on more or less this topic, you might find these of interest: http://www.netmagazine.com/features/2011-review-15-web-confe...

Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity.

http://vimeo.com/28885655

I liked the WWDC talks and Chris Liscio's talk at Çingleton.

Two of the lunchtime sessions at WWDC really inspired me as did much of the entire conference.

Morten Lunds talk at the Power of 1 conference in Battersea powerstation

Theo Schlossnagle's "Career Development" (Velocity 2011 Keynote):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0mHo7SMCQk

"Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures in Scala" at Strange Loop.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Functional-Data-Structure...

Glyph's keynote at Djangocon was hilarious and accurate. It also immediately sparked some wonderful and deep discussions about the future of Django.

http://blip.tv/djangocon/keynote-glyph-lefkowitz-5573264

Microconf 2011 by a few hundred country miles.

I have never had my head crushed by so much actionable info in 1-2 days. The entire conference was worth it by the time the first speaker had done his session and it kept getting better.

Design in the Land of Sharp Pointy Technologies, at Twiliocon

Simple made Easy by Rich Hickey by several miles.

Also "Hammock Driven Development" by the same gentleman.

Business of Software 2011 in Boston was great as usual. 300+ people that actually run software companies getting together to learn from each other. The most targeted conference for software entrepreneurs that I've seen.

There was a Ruby talk the guys at Nulayer did in Toronto that showed that Ruby can be nearly as fast as NodeJS. I wasn't fully convinced but I learned a ton of useful things.

Strangeloop 2011 - Bryan O'Sullivan

Running a Startup On Haskell: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Running-a-Startup-on-Hask...

Being in Aus we don't get to see many live and rely on the videos being made available. Of those I particularly liked Daniel Spiewak's "Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures" and Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy".

We were fortunate enough though to have the excellent YOW conference with many excellent talks, particular stand-outs coming from Simon Peyton-Jones and Mike Lee, but the absolute best talk (not necessarily the best tech, it is Perl after all) was Damian Conway's flabbergasting "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!"[1]

[1] http://www.yowconference.com.au/YOW2011/general/workshopDeta...

Josh Bloch's talks at Devoxx alone were worth the trip.

Sounds cliche and possibly like I'm pandering to the HN crowd, but Startup School. I quote it constantly - almost on a daily basis. It wasnt way more about soft skills than actual code, of course, but I find that to be more important.

Also, my best advice at any conference is to take notes. I took comprehensive Startup School notes, and reviewed them later. I never would have gotten so much out of it if I hadn't.

I like Mike Lee's talk 'Product Engineering' at SL2011 http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Product-Engineering as well as DHH's Railsconf 2011 Keynote speech on Asset Pipeline.

Learnt quite a bit from these two talks.