EclipseCon 2006 Final Thought

As someone that is very new to the whole eclipse community i found eclipsecon to be a very motivating and positive experience. The community will continue, full steam ahead for years to come. Of this I have no doubt.

Highlights of the conference for me:

• Joel Spolsky's talk to open the conference, if you read the description on the eclipsecon website it didnt really do it justice. His metaphores worked really well and i think everyone came out of the talk with the right idea. There is more to a product then its features, visualisation and emotion have alot to do with the success of the product.
  


• Ian Skerrit's talk on building community, and how to keep them healthy (No im not just saying this because he is my boss). He drove home the point that community based on "the conversation" and to really get the community to work together and build useful things there needs to be this conversation.


• Ward Cunningham - Ward's just awesome and he loves being blogged about, For those not familiar with Ward he's a pioneer of modern thinking and computing. I mean the guy helped develop extreme programming, and is credited as the father of Wiki, If you dont know what a wiki is then you must be living under a rock.


• Food - The food at the conference was plentiful, lunches were good, reception dinners while not sit down were a good assortment of everything. I mean they even had a chocolate fountain, not only in milk chocolate but white chocolate too!


• The after dinner / bar conversations, I got alot of time to bond with the other foundation employees, Healthy work relationships are always good


• Being in california meant never having to lug a big winter coat around all the time :)
  

I got a chance to meet the RadRails guys, imagine three 20 year olds that have developed an amazing product, are in third year university, and leave eclipseCon with 6 job offers. They showed me RadRails and i will definetly check it out.

Schwag! I got lotsa crap. 3 Shirts, a backpack, 256 meg USB key (that had all the conference slideshows and PDFs on it, Brilliant!), a Hacky Sac, a couple pens, a self reeling network cable, and im probably forgeting something.

The flights have been ok, with the exception of the frist flight from Ottawa to Chicago. I had a 6 year old kid, kicking the back of my seat for the whole flight, it was kinda like a very bad shiatsu massage. I'm blogging this from the San Jose - Chicago flight. Prime was the inflight movie which wasnt that great, stupid ending if you ask me but i digress. I'll be good to be back home in Ottawa to see my lovely wife and pooch.