Last day. Still pretty good, but didn't rock as much as the first.
Attended a couple more of Jared Richardson's sessions: "Agile Testing Strategies", and "Software Development Techniques". Lots of good real-world examples, and lots of inspiration for changing our processes. Definitely thinking of picking up Ship It!
Neal Ford's "Pragmatic Extreme Programming" was good. But, I think it'll be easier to work in lessons from Jared's sessions (on days 1 and 2) into our existing process.
I wasn't going to attend Brian Sam-Bodden's "Complex Builds with Ant" session. From the slides, it appeared like I'd already knew the major tips on my own. But, I was wiped out by the last session. Decided it was worth going to a topic I was familiar with in order to pick an expert's brain. Only three attendees, so the session went fast and I was able to ask a lot of questions.
More sour-grapes today over all the Ruby rah-rah-rah. Again, Neal Ford declared Ruby the winner in the dynamic language race on the JVM. Neal is a very smart guy, a great presenter, and also great to talk to one-on-one. I don't have any issue with him advocating Ruby. Any language that makes developers more productive is a good thing. But, it seems disingenuous to declare a victor in a wide open race to a room full of people who have little to no experience with dynamic languages.
Personally, I prefer Python over Ruby. Others can and should disagree. Here's a fair, but slightly biased (since the author is familiar with Python), comparison of Python vs. Ruby.
I'm not sure who to blame for lack of Python excitement in the Java world (or at least at this conference). Maybe with the recent revitalization of the Jython project, it will get more Java developer's attention.
Microsoft's CLR (and the new DLR and Silverlight) seems very exciting. See here and here and here. The second link is a screencast showing interoperation between Ruby, JavaScript, Python, and VB.
All in all, the conference was very good. I'll definitely plan on going next year.
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