Today starts the "No Fluff Just Stuff" conference here in Phoenix. Thanks to my current employer I will be able to attend this highly regarded Java conference. This is my first technical conference and going without anyone that I personally know does make it a bit intimidating. Add to the mix, that Java is not my strongest cup of tea and you can see why I might be the shy kid in the back. To be honest, I am not really that intimidated by the whole thing and I expect to learn a lot. I am wrapping up a project right now and I hope that soon thereafter I can start working on a small JSP application I have in mind.

We received the final agenda a couple of days ago and have pretty much decided on what session I will attend. There are some that will prove to be of great value here at the office as we are starting to create a development structure and the environment to support it. We are a small development team and we are starting to see some "growing" pains, even though we are not growing as far as head count goes. We do have a very receptive team here so I expect to be able to take some of this new knowledge and put to practice right away.

Some of the sessions that I plan to attend include:

• Ant for Newbies by Erik Hatcher
• OpenSource Ecosystems by Dave Thomas
• Advanced Version Control with CVS by Dave Thomas
• Programming with Hibernate by Bruce Tate
• Advances in Web Services by Venkat Subramaniam