G2X was one sensational event and Jay/Bob/Scott and the boys sure know how to put on a NFJS show. Jay is just one infectious guy who really “gets it” when it comes to what developers are looking for. The food was just sensational, the speaker line-up meant you has “clashing” sessions all the time (where you wanted to go to more than one session in a timeslot, but you don’t implement clone()), and the Grails community is full of rocking people who are just fun to hang out with.
Some random stuff that I took away form the show:
- I could sit with any random group of folk at that conference and come away getting inspired. The passion level among the group community is obviously very high - people genuinely love writing in Groovy & Grails and it shows.
- Scott Davis is on some other planet of speaker showmanship. His keynote on “Groovy by the Numbers” was just sensational had some serious Presentation Zen going on. I was blown away.Really captivating.
- Try to avoid having your session at the same time as Jason Rudolph. Any session that Jason was involved with was packed to the rafters. I missed the end of his talk on Refactotum, but still came away heavily impacted by his dedication to testing and software craftsmanship. Some software quality guys make you feel ashamed when you drop the ball on code quality, but guys like Jason just make you feel inspired to take things to the next level.* Venkat Subramanium is one sensational programmer. I leant heaps of stuff from his talk on Groovy DSLs and metaclasses. It was phenomenal. Looks like an older copy of the slides are here* It’s always great to have a chance to hang out with the G2One guys: Graeme, Alex, Jeff. They’re hiring at the moment! You could be one of the lucky ones!
- Great to catch up with Alexandru, who is the founder of InfoQ!
- Made some great new friends at the conference. Met up with [Ken Kousen](http://kousenit.wordpress.com/), [Dave Klein](http://www.capjug.org), [Andres & Ix-chel Almiray](ttp://www.jroller.com/aalmiray),[James Williams](http://www.jameswilliams.be) and too many others to name. It was awesome.
- None of the sessions were recorded, so if you didn’t make it, you’re out of luck. There is, however, a west coast version of the conference coming in October in San Jose, and Grails Exchange will be on in London sometime iin the later half of the year for the European folks. For those Aussies out there, everything is 30 hours travel until I can convince someone to run a Groovy.Au conference. (with delays in airports it took me around 28 hours to get home. Geez we live a long way from North America!)* As always, talking with Dierk König always leaves me with tons of ideas for new projects, and inspired by his real world experiences using Groovy in the enterprise - look out Australian Govt!
- Thanks to all those who came to my sessions . The rooms were full and the crowd was very enthusiastic. Congrats to all those who won clip-on koalas!
Hope to see you all again soon!
PS. I have to learn TextMate before my next presentation. The stuff people were doing with it was unbelievable!