Around the same time as I accepted my new job, I found out about BarCampRDU. I went ahead and signed up for it. I figured, “Hey, free conference.” It was this past Saturday and I had a really good time. I met a few other IBMers and also heard some interesting session talks. Andy Hunt had a talk about “Refactoring Your Wetware” that was quite interesting that clearly had more info in it than he could cram into the hour time slot. He’s apparently been putting together a day long workshop on the topic. Jared Richardson and Brenton Leanhardt had a session on Continuous Integration and showed Cruisecontrol and Continuum demos. To me, Cruisecontrol doesn’t quite have the power I want it to and Continuum seems to rely on you using Maven for everything or it isn’t as powerful as it could be. Honestly, it looks like both work, but to me, need more work. Joe Gregorio gave a talk on the Atom Publishing Protocol, which is something I think I will need to take a serious deep dive into relating to my new job. A guy from 6th Sense Analytics gave a pretty cool presentation of using Dojo to build sexy Ajax web applications, looks very cool and can been hooked up to any backend language, unlike GWT.

So I learned about a few things, met a few people,. got some free food and a few free t-shirts. Not a bad Saturday.

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