Days two and three were just as great as far as the content of the presentations and the level of the speakers. I really the enjoy the contact that we have with developers such as Ben Galbraith, Dave Thomas, David Geary and Jason Hunter — just to name a few, since everyone here are amazing technical minds.

Saturday morning I caught "Unit Testing Java with Jython" by Stuart Halloway and "Killer Web UIs" by David Geary. The Jython presentation was interesting for two reasons: we are not doing as much unit testing as we should be doing and it is python. I know that we need to increase our testing habits but I am not sure that our team could handle python, despite the recommendations other developers made. Killer Web UIs was a great presentation on Tiles and Sitemesh. Instead of comparing the frameworks to each other, Geary took an example and demonstrated how to accomplish the objective with each one by itself and at last with both combined. It was a truly learning experience and I will take a closer look at tiles after watching his presentation.

The evening sessions included what I probably think was the most attended presentation of the weekend. Ben Galbraith took on ~100 developers and live-coded an AJAX application. There were a couple of little bugs but nothing that could not be solved by the entire group. I attended the presentation because I wanted to hear what he had to say about the technology. The implementation is the easy thing at this point in time, there are other issues that need to be investigated before we decide to deploy AJAX applications everywhere.

On Sunday I attended "Lightweight Development Strategies" by Bruce Tate, "Introduction to WS-2005" by Ted Neward , "Extreme Web Caching" by Jason Hunter and "Introduction to TestNG" by Andrew Glover. The first couple were mostly discussions about the current state of technology and sort of looking into the magic ball. Jason’s presentation on caching was fantastic. He explained some of the caching strategies shared by Yahoo’s Mike Radwin and I have to say that most of them were trivial, easy to deploy and so simple that you ask yourself how come you never thought of that yourself!

Jay Zimmerman announced that NFJS DSSS will back to Phoenix in July of 2006 and I plan to be there. During the conference I was able to have some conversations with Ted Neward, Jason Hunter and Andrew Glover. It was great to hear what they had to say on technology and non-technology topics, after all they are human!