My Weekend With Experts
I just got back from my Weekend With Experts in Philadelphia, and I have to say that it's probably one of the best, new small seminars out there. It's two days of intense brain overload from people who have been working in these technologies for longer than I've been alive.
Some of the speakers were Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky, two AJAX experts that have been using AJAX since well before it was "AJAX". They've been following the development of XMLHttpRequest since 1998 and they killed my hype buzz fast (which is a good thing). They knew exactly what it could do and what it couldn't and even showed off a cool new advance from Macromedia called Flex. I was very much against using Flash for your rich internet applications, but I can definitly see it's use now. I don't plan on building full on websites with it, because it's just not designed for that, but there are enough way cool things about it to put it in my arsenal. I'll probably be playing around with OpenLaszlo soon.
Sang Shin from Sun gave a great talk on Web Application Security Threats. A lot of it I already knew, but this was way more in depth than I had ever gotten with it before and he showed a ton of great open source tools that I hadn't seen before. I might get a list up here soon for all the other web heads out there.
Ajit Sagar (I can't remember what company he was from)(It's InfoSys) gave a great overview of Service Oriented Architecture. This is a big buzz word that some of my co-workers have been throwing around the office lately and now I realize how full of shit they all are. SOA is a big project that requires really studying the whole company and how it works and throwing up a few web services does not create an SOA. Ajit has been setting these up at companies for years and he knew every pitfall and detail of implementing SOAs and I can only hope that I absorbed a tiny fraction of his knowledge about the subject.
Joe Celko is an SQL guru. He had an SQL tips and tricks session that blew my mind. He's got a few books out that I am going to have to check out now. I've always been an SQL newbie, but this really peaked my interest. And his despise of Oracle was riveting.
I really can't believe how valuable this was. The talks were about 5 times more informative than any talk at OSCON. I love OSCON for the people, but there's something to be said for being in a small group of about 15 people and having a technology genius there at your disposal. Most of the talks broke down into hour long discussions that were amazingly informative, way more so than if 50 people sat there and watched someone flipping through their powerpoint at a frame a second.
Check out the program and if the sessions look good to you, go to the next weekend. Our group was only about 20 people and most of them were local, so you will get up close and personal with these people. There's no marketing going on and the speakers are there to teach and not to evangalize. If you can get the $319 rate, it is so worth it. I really hope that it changes enough over time that I can go again. It's an awesome format for learning and I hope that more people try doing this with other technologies.
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