netzooid

I know this is just a few days late, but Gregor just got his out, so at least I’m in good company.

I spent a lot of time this year manning the Envoi booth with Paul. Paul’s entry captures most of my thoughts, but its worth just recapping some things.

The booth was a good chance to talk to people about their needs and how they’re using CXF & XFire. Conversations ranged from educating people about our open source involvement to talking about WebLogic issues to discussing advanced product integration to whats next for CXF. It was also a good chance to educate people about our business. As Paul mentioned, it is easy to have your work in open source get disconnected from the company you work for. Conferences seem to be a good way to help establish that connection.

I was very unimpressed with the start up booths this year. They tried a new layout that resulted in us getting comparatively little traffic. While they admitted it was a mistake, they were were pretty unapologetic about it and tried very little to fix it.

The nighttime parties were a lot of fun this year (as always). While I sufferred from a cold the whole week, I did manage to stay out late a fair amount (which probably didn’t help). The new restaurant of the week was the Town Hall. Highly recommended. Other highlights included visiting the Slanted Door yet again, the RedMonk unconference, the Tangosol party, and a visit to the “place of leaky abstractions.”

The disappointments of the week included being randomly bitten (hard) in a bar by some drunk woman and the Google party at the W.

(Updated to move the letter to Google to a separate post and also add mention to the RedMonk unconference. Random question: is everyone a RedMonk customer these days? Crikey - they’re everywhere.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 5:42 am and is filed under Javercising, Tech Ramblings.