Returned from the RSC: back to the rest of the world

Well, the IBM Rational Software Conference 2009 is over again. It was once again a great conference with lots of interesting new developments and insights. The Jazz products are evolving very fast, and they really try to improve on weak points first and adding only features that are really useful and relevant in real life. I really like the “enterprise” focus of RSC, as much fun as dancing robots or spinning cubes are, it’s much more interesting to see how technology and tools can be applied in real scenarios. For fun and entertainment, comedian Mitch Fatel cohosted with a reality show using real developers. Basically, just like on tv, the show was pretty corny, but fun when the developers started arguing and acting like idiots to win the discussion. Those developers were also attending/speaking, and it was funny to see some guy getting an evil eye all the time while doing lunch (tv will do that to you). The guys from Mythbusters were special guests, although it was a shame that they could not blow anything up on stage because of the fire department regulations. They did provide some insight on risk management, the process of creating experiments, and space ships fueled with poo.

When I was at the conference, I completely disconnected from the rest of the world to focus on all the content. Now that I am back, I am reading up on all the other interesting stuff that happened the last few weeks. European elections, JavaOne, Google I/O, a lot happened in such a short time. Google is moving more and more into the Java space, with the AppEngine Java offering and the exciting new Google Wave initiative, fully based on GWT. The Wave demos are a great showcase for GWT. A lot of the Google I/O sessions are already up on the web, and I’ll soon here from my colleagues that visited JavaOne what happened over there. It’s great that despite the economic crisis, innovation still happens!