SpringOne/2GX is now over and most everyone has made their way back to the real world. Rather than write a long-winded review of the conference, I decided to summarize my thoughts in the form of a retrospective. That is, what went well, what didn't go so well, and what I'd improve upon next time around.
Feel free to contribute to this retrospective with your own comments.
What went well
- The Day 1 Keynote
- The keynote on Monday night was quite interesting with SpringSource tcServer Developer Edition stealing the show. But also hearing about all of the different facets of the Spring ecosystem and seeing how they are evolving was great.
- Adrian Colyer's comedic bit to start the Day 2 Keynote
- Funny stuff. Adrian's quite the story teller. Wish I could find this on YouTube.
- My talk on SpEL went well
- I had given this talk twice before with less-than-desirable results. This time it worked out. It may have been the best talk I've ever given.
- The people
- It was great meeting and chatting with so many people who are also interested in Spring and Groovy/Grails. Also fun to catch up with my friends in SpringSource who I only get to see once per year.
- Rod Johnson's duet
- Rod played piano while another attendee played clarinet. Very entertaining.
- Roo and tcServer Dev Edition
- The darlings of the show. Almost everyone was talking about them. Both are awesome and you should check them out.
- The Roosevelt New Orleans
- This was hands-down one of the nicest hotels that I've ever stayed in. Very comfortable and luxurious. Highly recommended.
- The food
- The food served at lunch and dinner during the conference was outstanding.
When didn't go so well
- The Day 2 Keynote
- Don't get me wrong...I think the VMWare stuff is cool and interesting. But this is a developer conference and the parade of VMWare products would have better suited an IT crowd. It was interesting, but not valuable to me. I did find Chris Richardson's demo of CloudFoundry very interesting, though.
- The constant pinging sound in Salon 5
- What the heck was that?
- My failure to schedule appropriately
- I think that my strategy for choosing which sessions to attend was flawed. All of the sessions were great, but I think I could've learned more by attending a different mix of sessions. I'm especially regretful that I didn't attend more Groovy-oriented sessions.
- The size of the desserts
- Last year's desserts were much bigger...slices of cake the size of your head. This year they were more petite. But, if you smash several of them together...
Things to improve upon next year
- Personal session selection
- I should try to attend more sessions on topics that I don't know as well.
- More audience interaction
- The best part of my talk was where the audience chimed in with things to try in SpEL. I should purposefully set aside time to "take requests" from the crowd in my talks.
- Get more sleep
- I missed out on a few things because I was exhausted. Should plan my sleep better so that I can attend and see more stuff.
- Bigger desserts
- 'Nuff said.
