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The Law of Lines


By Allen Holub
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August 1, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Whatever checkout line you’re in is always the slowest, and if you move to a new line, the line you were just in speeds up and the new line slows down. That’s the Law of Lines.

The Conference Corollary of this universal law applies to conference sessions: Whatever session you’re in is always a dog, but if you session-hop, the one you leave turns great and the one you go to becomes awful.

Of course, my information about the good sessions comes from newly made friends who might be lying in order not to admit that they made a bad choice. Maybe all the sessions are bad. Maybe I just have a low threshold for boredom.

I bring up the Law of Lines because I’ve just come away from this year’s JavaOne, which provided many examples of the Conference Corollary. A couple of the sessions I went to were great, but most of them were what I’ve come to expect from large conferences: boring marketing fluff, technical sessions that were too short to be useful, or technical sessions that presented perhaps 10 minutes of useful material in a 90-minute format.

Matters were made worse by the build-up to the conference, which led me to believe that things would be different this year.

I was hoping for lots of education and less marketing. After all, most of the sessions were billed as tutorials, advanced how-tos or instructor-led hands-on labs.

Let’s start with the hands-on sessions. Sun set up a great hands-on room, loaded with computers and big enough to handle a good-sized group. “At last,” I thought, “they’ve taken the notion of education seriously.”

I was wrong. The room sat empty for most of the conference because Sun scheduled, at most, four hours of hands-on per day.

To make matters worse, with only one exception, every hands-on class was a NetBeans tutorial of some sort. This is like adding insult to injury—I really don’t understand why Sun insists on putting so much effort into NetBeans rather than working collaboratively with the rest of the industry on Eclipse.




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