London’s calling for salesforce is a classic community conference with all the things that you don’t normally get in a vendor or marketing conference.
Initial impressions as someone attending it for their first time was that the conference was run by a long-time group of friends, 1 and gave off that warm community feel but still run professionally, and given that Salesforce is a still growing trend it was well catered for with all the freebies, everything from massages to good giveaways.
The content was far more what I like to see at a conference, with tons of deep dive content for the product and how to use and expand it. As you can see from the screenshot, there was loads of concurrent sessions going on and the vendor area was well placed because you go via it between sessions to grab a coffee.
The Vendor area its self was nicely laid out, and fit in well with the conference timetable giving you time when you needed it to have a good chunk of time to talk to a specific vendor.
Good T-shirt Swag, solid make good art and slightly unusual (front)
You could not get your t-shirt till at least lunchtime. So you can’t run off early which is always a known problem when hosting an event inside a major metropolis that is full of interesting stuff.
The session content its self was slightly different to the other community conferences I go to, which are very very geeky with live coding, meaning you had to research before you even went to the session. This was far more accepting to people who didn’t know much about Salesforce or its community. I think the phrase to sum it up would be “No Click Code”, which seems to be a buzzword used by a number of the vendors.
Personally, I do wish there was one channel available that you went to and did some really, really geeky stuff that was written by the pure devs, but I’m aware that that’s because that’s what I am. Everything else seemed to be catered for perfectly with good food and even an after conference party.
Something that should be noted is they’ve managed to achieve near perfect diversity on genders in both attendees and presenters, far better than any of the big conferences or even previous communities ones, however they’ve done it, other conferences should be copying it.
Conclusion
Frankly I have not been shutting up about this conference to my colleagues that do salesforce, and will sure as hell be going next year as well as dragging multiple people with me, it is very much recommended.
- just like the IBM ones I used to attend,[↩]