My hotel is "behind" the Sun/Oracle campus so I had to circle around through the endless acres of parking lots to get to the right entrance. But it was pretty easy, and not as far as it looked on the map. I've never had much to do with giant organizations so it's still a little mind boggling when you use an automated kiosk (like the ones at the airport) to get your visitors badge.
The sessions were a real mixture, from stuff where the nuances were pretty much over my head, to thinly veiled sales pitches with no technical details. It was pretty neat to be in the company of people you're used to thinking of as gurus, like Doug Lea, John Rose, Joshua Bloch, and Cliff Click. And nice to see they have their frustrations with the technology also.
It's naive of me, but unconsciously I expect really smart people to be "rational", and it's always a bit of a disappointment when that proves to be untrue. Smart people have egos, are insecure, or argumentative, or negative, or defensive, or obnoxious, just like everyone else.
Maybe I'm just too soft, but I felt bad for one guy who basically got told he was doing it wrong. It seems like they could just have well asked "did you consider ..." or "what would you think about ...", rather than just "that's wrong, you should have done ..."
Mostly I just listened to the conversations. In the Java / JVM area I still feel like a relative novice and I'm not sure I have much to contribute yet. But for the most part I didn't feel too much out of my depth, so that's good.
1 comment:
Glad to hear the conference is going well!!!! It is hard for me to believe that any programming stuff is over your head. That boggles MY mind. I am not just saying that cause u are my boss, its true :-)
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