Day 13: QCon Tokyo and dojo.sake.tokyo
April 22nd, 2009 by Dylan
April 10th was the final day of QCon Tokyo and the first ever dojo.sake event as well.
I began the day with a meeting at a large Japanese company that has an interest in Ajax. After that, I took Henrik up on his advice to walk around and pick a place somewhat at random and see what they offer. The first place I went to was already closed after lunch. The second place in a random basement on street outside the east exit of Shinagawa Station had some great choices, and I went with katsu pork which was phenomenal, and rather affordable.
In the late afternoon, the conference ended with a panel discussion. It was a bit different than any panel I’ve been on before in that we all stood up for an hour and just talked and walked around a bit. It was a good discussion about the future of software development for the enterprise. I love how they simplify the panel voting process:
It was then time to get going back to Shibuya for the Dojo Dinner. Because I did not have a printer, I hand sketched what I thought would be a good map (basically 3 lines) for when I left the station. Little did I realize that the station had exits on all sides. Shockingly though, in about 20 minutes, I ended up at the right building on my own which was pretty awesome given that I had no viable way to determine direction or magnitude of my map! I showed the map to Bill Keese and the other attendees, and they laughed and said, wow, you found it based on that map!
The beer and dinner at Gon-panchi was great. In a private room, it’s described as Japanese pub food, simply because they have all different types of Japanese cuisine, plus all different types of drinks. You might also think of it as being like Japanese pub tapas though as the quality was excellent. From sushi to yakitori to tempura, it was all great, even the cold sake.
After dinner, we walked around Shibuya for a bit and I took some pictures and a cool video where the traffic of people walking around sounds like waves which I thought was a pretty interesting effect. Turn on your sound to hear it:
Finally, what popular tourist attraction would exist without the requisite Starbucks and even a Krispy Kreme:
