DevDays 2004

I attended DevDays here in Atlanta today, and had a pleasant lunch with Paul Wilson.  It was good to catch up with him - it's always refreshing to talk to someone smarter than me.  We shared a table with Jeff Prosise for lunch.  Ok, that's me name dropping, because I don't believe that I said more than two words to Jeff.  I'm always afraid that I'll sound like some FanBoy when I talk to the authors I consider "Great."  (That's a short list, by the way.)

The most interesting part of DevDays for me is usually the chance to catch up with some old co-workers and acquaintances.  This Devdays was no exception.  I saw several people I knew, and took a few minutes to catch up.  The most interesting bit was when I talked to Chase Beasely, one of the old directors from my days at Priceline.com.  See, Chase was the guy who was tasked with pink-slipping me when Priceline closed their Atlanta office. There was no discrimination here - they pink slipped the whole office.  Chase was just drew my name in some sort of strange "manager lottery."

Immediately, I introduced Chase as the "guy who canned me back during my dot-com minute," and his face turned slightly red.  He mumbled something about that not being the way that one likes to be introduced, and the laughter quickly turned jovial.  I did enjoy putting Chase on the spot, as my experience was not pleasant, back in 2000.  However, I don't hold it against him. 

The rest of DevDays was uneventful.  I think I'm getting a bit jaded over these events, as the presentations seem overly simple, and I find little value in attending.  I get more from my monthly MSDN Magazine fix, really.

4 Comments

  • It was great catching up Jerry.

  • I think you're right -- the material was a little too basic. I was especially disappointed with the threat modeling session, though I can understand that you can't really fit the topic into a 1-hour talk. All in all, if not for meeting Jeff and Doug, I'd want my money back.

  • "...it's always refreshing to talk to someone smarter than me."



    ...smarter than *I*. ;-)

  • Yep, good seeing you today. Also ran into Chase, and I thought I saw another old priceliner--but I can't remember his name.



    The show was a bit disappointing, not to mention that I got called out right after lunch and missed most of the afternoon sessions. But Paul is right, these presentations are generally meant to allow people who've been doing too much work to catch up on what's going on. It was worth it to me just to get the Whidbey bits. I also enjoyed the end keynote demo'ing Whidbey, and I appreciated the fact that the smart client track used a "real world" example throughout.



Comments have been disabled for this content.