Last Day at StrataConf

It’s been almost a week since StrataConf ended, but I’ve been busy recovering from the travel and catching up.  Before I forget too much about the last day, though, I want to get my notes down here.

The day opened with a bunch of short “keynotes” again, just like Wednesday, and they were of highly variable value (also just like Wednesday).  Ed Boyajian of EnterpriseDB presented nothing but straight marketing material, a commercial that I think influenced no one.  But DJ Patil of LinkedIn gave a very interesting talk focused on hiring extremely talented people and helping them do their best work, and Carol McCall of Tenzing Healthcare gave a not only interesting, but inspiring talk about how to start fixing the mess our country has made of healthcare (video here).

The day was shorter than Wednesday, but still pretty long, ending at about 6:00PM.  I felt the sessions were, overall, weaker this day than on Wednesday, but they closed extremely strong.  The panel on Predicting the Future, chaired by Drew Conway and with short talks from Christopher Ahlberg,  Robert McGrew, and Rion Snow, followed discussion, was fantastic.  The format of short talks to set the stage for the panel worked great.

All in all, StrataConf was eye opening to me.  I had very little background in using data these ways, and now I feel ready to explore much more deeply on my own.  Many of the presentations and some videos are available online, and they’re worth a look.  And if you ever get a chance to attend a talk by Drew Conway, Joseph Turian, or Hilary Mason, I recommend you take it.  They each have a lot of interesting things to say, and they’re very good at saying them.