And Day Two is at an end.
Dave and I woke up to two pleasant surprises this morning. First, the sessions didn’t begin until 10:00, giving us an extra hour to catch up with some other conference attendees. Second, they served a hot breakfast this morning (normally, it’s just danish and fruit, which is also great, but today they added eggs, potatoes, sausage, and bacon).
Anyway, I was running pretty ragged this morning. There were two sessions before lunch, and I was presenting for both of them. I started with my database session, which I thought went really well. My biggest problem was that I had so much information to share that I ended up rushing at the end to squeeze everything in. But it was still a lot of fun. The people who attended asked lots of great of questions and I had a great time. But then, I could talk for weeks on end about databases and not get bored. Next year, I’m going to pitch it as two separate sessions. There’s more than enough material for that.
“Cross-Platform Interface Tricks” was my second session. To be totally honest, I was extremely nervous going into it, even more so when I saw some of the REALbasic community’s heavy hitters in the crowd. But it turned out great. I wasn’t too sure about how it went, but afterward, I got a lot of compliments on the session and some people told me they really learned a lot. My favorite comment was from someone who told me that I was the first conference presenter he’d ever heard who pronounced Gnome (the window manager) correctly.
Then we broke for lunch: cold sandwiches. Conversation topics at our table included computer forensics, solid state drives, computer-generated music, DNA-generated music, and school security.
After lunch I was going to sit in on Marco’s REAL SQL Server session, but the room was so crowded that I headed over to Bryan Lunduke’s session on Designing for Linux instead, which turned out to be really interesting. I don’t know if Tangelo has a future on Linux, but I’m pretty sure Kodiak could. After that, I sat in on Keith DeLong’s most excellent session on report printing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the second half, because I was scheduled to teach my third session of the day.
That session was on open source licensing. I blazed through my slides in about thirty minutes, which was way faster than I’d expected, but we ended up having some really good discussions about various open source and copyright issues, including some talk about the upcoming GPL 3.
I wrapped up the day with Mike Woodworth’s session on optimization, which was also very good. Mike is a really smart guy and an engaging presenter.
After a break, we all gathered for dinner here at the Omni, then we had a trivia contest and a time for socializing. I snuck away for a while to video chat with my family, but we kept getting messages about not having enough bandwidth. Stupid wireless. Anyway, Dave and I got to spend some time chatting with Geoff Perlman and Matt Quagliana. I’m always amazed at what down-to-earth people REAL Software is made up of.
Speaking of Geoff, I forgot to mention one very important thing in last night’s post. After Trish Murphy’s band finished their set, they brough Geoff up on stage to play drums for a rockin’ cover of “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks (one of my all-time favorite bands, of course). Geoff was really great on the kit. The best part is that you can watch the whole thing on YouTube (please excuse the weird sculpture of the naked blue chick behind the drumset).
I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions, especially Joe Strout’s session on developing web apps. I’m kinda sad the conference will be ending tomorrow, since it’s such fun, but at the same time, I’m really looking forward to getting home to my family.