Dev8D: Five minutes with John Murray

Feb 15, 2012 by michelle-pauli

‘There needs to be more with everyone in the same room trying to achieve the same goal, with the same focus”: John Murray, lecturer in computer science at the University of Lincoln, takes a critical view of Dev8D and suggests the event’s structure has some room for improvement

What brought you to Dev8D?

I attended the DevXS event hosted at Lincoln and found out about Dev8D and devcsi there. So it’s my first time at Dev8D. I expected a bigger version of DevXS but it’s not as good. DevXS seemed more upbeat, with a lot more stuff going on, a lot more stuff hacking away. Here it seems more… mundane.

DevXS was in one room so everyone was together and there was a great atmosphere from that whereas here it is spread across two floors and so you can’t seen everything that’s going on. I thought Dev8D would be more educationally focused but have not found that. There is more data sharing sort of stuff but it is very different from what thought it was going to be like.

What have you found interesting?

I heard an interesting talk about the gender imbalance in video games – good to hear peoples thoughts on that, it’s a hot topic. There are some demos – the 3D printer stuff – that are fantastic. Really interesting and really good. For me it’s more the hands-on type stuff I’ve found really interesting.

What might you take back to Lincoln?

Contacts, people that I’ve met that I can now put a face to a name. I know what people are doing and their projects so we can share ideas.

How could Dev8D change?

It needs more single track things going on – more with everyone in the same room trying to achieve the same goal, with the same focus. Having lightning talks over lunchtime didn’t work for me. I would like to see a bigger room, more people all together all at once so that they can walk around and talk to each other and see what’s going on.