I took the weekend and Monday to recover from the jet lag etc of getting back from Vegas – I can never get used to flying west-to-east.
The WebSphere Services Technical Conference 2007 was superb. As you will see if you looked at any of my entries during the week, there was a huge variety of material on the agenda. It wasn’t just deep technical stuff either – I could have attended project management or professional development tracks. In most time slots I had a choice of 3 or 4 sessions that I considered “very interesting” out of around 20 on offer. I blogged most of the material that I reasonably could.
As always with face-to-face events, the absolute best part was meeting people in person. Colleagues and friends who have moved to other countries (Peter Burton, Mark Jeynes); US colleagues who I’ve not had the chance to meet in person before (T.Rob Wyatt, Wayne Schutz, Jeff Lowrey); people I was introduced to from different parts of the business; my own distributed team in the UK and Europe.
Aside from that, the accommodation was good – I stand by last year’s statement that the Rio Hotel is the right size for this kind of event without scattering people up and down the Strip.
What was the buzz? Well, as I’ve indicated in my posts, a lot of the talk was around Web 2.0 technologies and methods. I know this has been biting for some time in other parts of the software portfolio, but it was great to hear people in WebSphere talking about it, and hopefully I can bring my “social” experience to bear. What else? It was reassuring to hear that there is a lot of vigour in the part of the portfolio that I’ve made my living in for the past few years – messaging. I was also really interested to meet with people to talk about industry-specific trends in corridor conversations. Overall, there was a great range of material to learn about and feed on, and I’ve returned refreshed, invigorated… and mostly over the jet lag 🙂
Edit 02/05/07 – I really shouldn’t write late at night – repeated myself and overused the word “stuff”! 😉
Technorati Tags: conference, IBM, Web 2.0, wstc, wstc2007
