Well the Super Bowl is set. I am so glad that New England lost, not that I have anything against Boston, but it's like the Yankee's they are always there, and I never liked Tom Brady (from UM). I am sure I will be rooting for Indianapolis, no knock against Chicago, just Indy is closer.
Yesterday we [...]

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I like PHP but as you know I don't care much for the so called “frameworks” out there. But why are they so popular? Heck my fellow APress friends have even published a book on Symfony, so it can't be that bad right?

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To all the cool people I met and cool sessions I was not able to attend today, sorry but I had to leave early this morning to attend to stuff in Columbus. I can't wait to see you again, VERY COOL CONFERENCE! Looking forward to 2008.

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Well, I spoked with more speakers tonight than I did during any of the sessions. There was a Very Cool After Hour Party thrown by Quick Solutions. I feel bad that I could not talk to so many cool people, but I met a few fellow APress Authors, which was very cool, a bunch of [...]

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This was a basic Python overview. I was wishing for more grit, but given the demographic (Java/.Net) folks, this was probably just about right. I get the GIST that Python is really for people with or wanting Linux systems, that need or want to integrate and wrap a bunch of C/C++ APIs to/with their application. [...]

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This was a talk by Bruce Eckel, of MindView.Net. I found his presentation interesting, mostly it was a talk about Burning Man, with interlaced photos, the story he told about why dynamic languages are a natural part of software development was nice.
The slide that stuck with me the most was a book, Peopleware, that observed [...]

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I have listened to 2 sessions thus far on Ruby, the first what makes Rails Possible, the second JRuby. Actually all talks today, except for the MySQL one, were talking about Ruby as a language. It's simplicity, it's elegance, what it does that Java, PHP, C#, do not.

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This session went over-time. Actually we were only through about half of it before we had to leave. Shame, it was a cool talk, I could have stayed for another hour or so learning about MySQL optimization.
I learned a few things on benchmarking (Apache Bench), and the EXPLAIN keyword. A few other tricks related [...]

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This keynote was by Neil Ford over at ThoughtWorks. I remember a few of his talks before over at No Fluff, Just Stuff (Java Conference). His talk was mainly about Domain Specific Languages (DSL).

While I have not heard the term or acronym before I have heard it by other names, Meta-Programming, Model Driven Architecture, [...]

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I got here late, but the hotel is nice, there were just no late night restaurants open… So far this morning, the attendance is more than I expected, and I actually knew a few people from Columbus. In fact I have met 5 people, 3 of which I did not know were going to be [...]

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