The GOTO Aarhus 2012  conference is over, and I can look back at some really good and inspiring days where I had the pleasure of hearing speakers like Martin Fowler talking about NoSQL databases.

As the title says, it was an introduction to NoSQL databases, but with references back to relational databases and even network databases, which was the predecessor to the relational databases. I’m old enough to have been taught about network databases in university, but nevertheless really interesting to see how a computer science field like databases is evolving. As with many of the other speakers at the conference, Martin Fowler did a very good job of keeping the right balance between theory and practice.

Scott Hanselman was talking about how the browser and the Web has evolved so it’s now possible to even run a Commodore 64 or Linux emulator using JavaScript. As he said, “JavaScript is The Assembler Language of the Web”:

This was followed up Anders Hejlsberg and some of his team members from Microsoft, when they presented TypeScript, which is a new type-safe language with classes that compiles into JavaScript. Of course the TypeScript compiler is written in JavaScript (Which is quite useful, as it then easily can run on different operating systems)

Michael T. Nygaard and several others had some really good sessions on Continuous Deployment. Michael talked about the concept of “deployment army”. Think we all know of situations where a deployment have required special skills.

One of the purposes of Continuous Deployment is to eliminate the need for big releases, by building up confidence around the software product, so it really always is in a releasable state. Then you can decide to release it or not, depending on your type of software and customers. And this is only a few of all the speakers I’ve heard in the last three days (actually the ones where I had some decent pictures...)

As said, it has been some fantastic days at the GOTO conference. The conference has been able to find just about the right balance between theory and practice in the sessions. Only very few sessions have been either too theoretical or practical oriented. Also when comparing this conference to Microsoft TechEd, which I attended earlier this year, I find the GOTO conference to have a much higher level, both when it comes to speakers and topics.

So if you are considering only one conference for the next year (and GOTO is able to keep the high professional level of speakers and topics) I will definitively recommend that you consider attending the GOTO conference. At least I certainly hope that I can be part of it again next year.