No Fluff Just Stuff 2004

At the end of his talk, Dave held up Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation book, which was actually on my to-buy list. But instead of just randomly giving the book away, Dave offered the book to the first person to correctly answer his question: "Who created ant?"

I was quick to answer "James Duncan Davidson!". He's been to two ADHOCs/MacHacks now, and I spent a little quality table time with him this year. So he was fresh in my mind.

Not feeling content to just rip off a great presentation and a free read from the community, I enlisted another agent: Nevin Liber. At that very same meeting, they raffled off a free admission to the conference, which Nevin won. I coerced Nevin to give me his ticket, but if you ask him he'll be really nice and act like it's just because his hand are too full with baby twins to take a weekend off. Thanks, Nevin!

The conference was just one town over from where I live: really convenient.

It struck me like what ADHOC would be like if put on by "professionals" and not volunteers. All the sessions were laid out ahead of time, and the schedule held. You got a conference CD at the beginning of the conference, with the slides already on them (in both PowerPoint and PDF formats). You got a binder with your name on it, and each session also had the slides available as printouts to pop into said binder. Attempting to reduce paper in my life, I chose not to take this option, but other folks liked it. You were greatly encouraged to rate each sessions and the overall conference. My only complaint was Wifi was limited to the unfree Wayport in the front in the hotel.

While the conference was a lot more nailed-down than ADHOC and had great content, it was also less fun than ADHOC. Frankly, I don't know if you can couple a locked-down well-organized conference with an attendee-driven-make-up-the-rules-as-you-go conference like ADHOC.

I attended Dave Thomas' talks on State Machines and Naked Objects, Mock Objects all of which were excellent. In particular, I'm stoked by Naked Objects. I've been wanting this for a long while, and resigned myself to writing it myself. It's great someone's already done this. Mike Clark was also there, but I didn't attend any of his sessions. Not so much because of the content, but because of timing. However, I did lend him my DVI/VGA adapter for his PowerBook-based presentations, which he used throughout the conference. Speaking of which, PowerBooks dominated the conference. Although most attendees didn't have their notebooks with them, which is very much unlike ADHOC or WWDC.

I also hit a session on Hibernate by Justin Gehtland and two sessions on XQuery by Jason Hunter. Jason also did a session on "Forgotten Algorithms" like Boyer-Moore.

All in all, a great conference, and well worth the time+money. Especially if you can leach of the community and get in free...

Monday, October 04, 2004
12:18 AM