MySQL Community team asked me to write about Devconf 2013 few months ago. Conference was in June, 2013, but I remembered about this my promise only now: month later after my participating in MySQL Connect and Expert Troubleshooting seminar (change country to United Kingdom if you see blank page). I think it is too late for the feedback, but I still have few thoughts which I want to record.

DevConf (former PHPConf) always was a place where I tried new topics. At first, because I know audience there very well and they will be bored if I repeat a story which I was telling last year, but also because it is much easier to get feedback in your own native language. But last years my habit seems started to change and I presented improved version of my 2012 MySQL Connect talk about MySQL backups. Of course, I also had a seminar with unique topic, made for this conference first time: Troubleshooting MySQL Performance with EXPLAIN and Using Performance Schema to Troubleshoot MySQL. And these topics, improved, were presented at the expert seminar. It is interesting how my habit changes and one public speaking activity interferes next one.

What is good about DevConf is it forces you to create new ideas and do it really well, because audience is not forgiving at all, so they catch everything you miss or prepared not good enough. This can be bad if you want to make a marketing-style topic for free, but allows to present technical features in really good details: all these sudden discussions really help.

In year 2013 Oracle had a booth at the conference and was presented by a bunch of people. Dmitry Lenev presented topic "New features of replication in MySQL 5.6" and Victoria Reznichenko worked on the booth.

What was new at the conference this year is greater interest in
NoSQL, scale and fast development solutions. This, unfortunately, means
not so huge interest in MySQL as it was earlier. However, at the same
time, "Common" track was really MySQL track: not only Oracle, but people
from other companies presented about it.