willCode4Beer

Spring Experience 2007 Meet and Greet

Update for the first day at the Spring Experience. Made it through registration. It's amazing the number of people waiting in line for it to open. Something you can say about the Spring crowd, they are pretty enthusiastic, as well as pragmatic.

I've met quite a few people here and even though they have great enthusiasm for working with Spring, they are pretty reserved and analytical about adopting technologies. They offer the cool-aid here but, nobody drinks ;-)

It's really cool being able to meet so many smart people in one place. I managed to have a fairly long conversation with Hal Hildebrand from Oracle. He's a very smart guy, and we exchanged a lot of ideas about Spring, development, practices, and techniques for attacking both large and legacy applications. This guy knows a lot of stuff about OSGi (that's a real understatement).

After registration, I attended a (exclusive the email said) Birds of a Feather (BoF) session with Rod Johnson, the guy behind it all. It really looked like an opportunity for him to get a feel for what folks are working on and what challenges they are facing. Of course, I piped in about unifying configuration. He answered lots of questions, and is a pretty down do earth guy. It's pretty cool getting to talk to others about their issues and solutions too.

After dinner, there were the Keynote speeches, that are the standard fair for any conference. In an interesting twist, most of the Keynote didn't really mention Spring but, instead talked about a lot of the issues we (developers) face and how the market and solutions are moving. When showing charts about how technologies are progressing (growing, dying, etc), most of the metrics were based on job postings. I swear there's some espionage going on, several associates and I have been saying for a long time that the job market provides the only truly valid metric.

During dinner, one of the guys at the table was showing off his iPhone. We got to talking about the built in browser, and he navigated over to my site. A nice little ego boost came when I discovered that he as well as some other people were visitors. WooHoo, somebody other than me uses it.

He showed the camera in the phone also. Below is a pic of Brian and I from the iPhone.



After the speeches, there was a meet and greet kind of party. All of the speakers were there just hanging out. One, name removed to protect the guilty, almost let slip some announcement for tomorrow. Should have caught him later after another beer or too. Ah well, guess I'll wait; no exclusive report tonight.

Update: How could I forget to post a picture of the Rod Johnson bobble head.

Labels: Spring Experience

posted by willCode4Beer @ 11:46 PM