There were very few moments for me during QCon London 2008 of earth-shaking enlightenment — if any. But every hour of the three days of the conference there were insights and guidance that could be tucked away, and reused later to save hours, days or weeks of time elsewhere. Snake-oil salesmen where thin on the ground, and instead there were dozens of people saying one or both of:

• This is what we did; and
• This is what you can do.

No magic, no silver bullets, but plenty of solid advice and experience.

A good example of both of these was Randy Shoup of eBay. He had nothing to sell (other than the good name of eBay, perhaps) and his presentation was very clearly constructed to show their principles of scalability, and some concrete examples of how these work in practice. You probably wouldn’t use their periodic batch processing method to generate recommendations — if only because it’s odds on you don’t have a recommendation system — but you could take the overarching principle of “async everywhere” and apply that to the next scalable application that you need to work on.

Even the very specific presentations contained valuable points that could be generalised and reused. For example, Matt Youill and Asher Glynn of Betfair talked through how they scaled the transaction processing on their servers by a hundred-fold. Guardian.co.uk doesn’t need that kind of throughput, so the details were primarily of intellectual benefit. But a key practical lesson was how they approached the problem: by presenting it to industry players as a challenge carrying great kudos to the winning company.

All of this was summed up very nicely by the team from BBC News: John O’Donovan, Kevin Hinde and Ross Heritage. They were asked how they managed performance testing for the iPlayer. John spent a few moments describing some of the techniques they employed, but got to the point when he realised the audience really wanted some eye-opening enlightenment which he didn’t have. At this moment Kevin stepped forward and said straight out “There’s no secret sauce”. Indeed not: they just work hard and stick to strong principles.

QCon offered little in the way of secret sauces, but it did contain dozens and dozens of great ingredients you could take away and use to concoct your own wonderful dishes.

And with that analogy pushed to breaking point, I think we should leave it there.