The only big downside was VERY POOR Wi-Fi and 1 Bar of Edge on AT&T. This meant that my blogging had to wait until after the conference.

The Thursday party was very cool, but it was a little disconnected with the tables and the band vs. the huge gatherings we use to have in the halls outside the rooms. Those seemed to be more social than this year.

I think that next year I want more intermediate and advanced talks, less beginner talks unless the amount of new technology is abundant and fun.

This was an OK presentation. I was a little distracted by the Neal Ford reference Ceremony vs. Essence. Perhaps Neal was not  the only person to use it, but because I heard it a few years ago at a CodeMash keynote, it distracted me. I wanted to learn more about the syntax of Clojure, but it did not go into that. I did gain some insight into the functional aspect of the language, but not enough I’m afraid.

I did get a book on the language by Stewart Holloway, I hope to read that in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully to learn more about how I can use this language for my robotics projects.

It was a pleasure seeing Andy speak. He’s one of the co-authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and it’s nice to see his perspective on things. Today’s talk was a pleasant surprise. No talk about Java evils or process improvement, but a discussion on cognitive science and why we think the way we do and how this thinking (or sometimes lack of thinking) leads us to certain paths in our programming or our project management structure.

The talk included a number of examples, but some of the most striking were videos that were used to illustrate points on lack of attention or diverted attention. One example had us focusing so hard at a certain group in the video, that a gorilla walking through the scene was just barely noticeable. Other examples asked you to notice something different or something that changed. Again, I did not get most of them and it really makes you think.

The talk ended with a great quote, actually more of a conversation between himself and his boss. He was asking for something, (I don’t know exactly what), and his boss responded “What’s stopping you?” he said “Nothing” and his boss replied, “that get’s in my wall a lot too”.

Nice talk, hope see others at some more conferences this year!

Another great talk by Joe, The theme of this talk was how to improve your career as a programmer if you are finding that you hate/dislike what you are doing. I was fortunate to get a 2^nd shot at this talk since it was packed in yesterday’s session.

Joe gave a number of personal examples about what inspired passion from his own career from sales rep to Java programmer, to now business owner and Ruby evangelist.

What I found amazing about this talk was the attendance, I mean Joe always has a nice turn-out but the number of people that are not liking their jobs is at an all-time high. You couple this with recent job satisfaction surveys and there’s something to people not liking their jobs even if it’s in a career that’s full of excitement and opportunity. I will have to write more about this in another post.

This was my second language talk, although the talk was more about Genetics and the calculations required for genetics than it was about Scala. I can imagine this talk much more interesting if it were a little longer or we had less of Genetics 101. Still I plan on downloading Scala and learning more about this language.

I was surprised to find out that Microsoft is actually doing a lot for open source, they’ve even contributed to the Linux Kernel in July of 2009.

But most notably my favorite language (PHP) they’ve done quite a bit of optimization and contributed greatly to PHP 5.3 on Windows. After this talk I actually plan on getting a copy of the source and building PHP myself.

This was a cool session. I have been in web development so long it’s completely eluded me that there might actually be desktop application frameworks for Java (Groovy).

There were a number of cool features and plugins available to this framework, one particular one I liked was the ability to make Swing apps use CSS mark-up for styling the form. How cool is that?

I always enjoy listening to Joe talk, his enthusiasm about Ruby is admirable. The talk focused on the differences in how to solve many programming problems with different languages. The ones demoed against Ruby were C# and Java.

I did not walk away with learning anything new about Ruby, ironically I learned more about C# in this than I did anything else. But for those new the Ruby it was a good talk especially since most of the developers here are either .Net or J2EE.

I realized that I am at the point where I don’t think I will ever be in an environment again with an organization where you need to worry about projects, development teams, etc; at least where I need to worry about the management, efficiency and effectiveness of those teams. For me about 5 years ago was about the right time for this talk, I could have used it to make myself an efficient coder and effective team lead/manager.

I spent the rest of the keynote planning my conference. So far I am going to just to to sessions where I can learn new things. Since I plan on using Ruby more this year a few language sessions will top my list, the first one, What Makes Ruby Different.