TechEd Day 3

It's amazing how fast three days can go when you've having fun and trying to learn everything there is know about everything in one hour sessions! But, the end has come, TechEd is over and, one hour later than the flight was scheduled, I have arrived back in Wellington. I will put together some 'lowlights' and some more detailed notes once I'm a little more awake but in the meantime, here's the highlights from today:

• Lukas Svoboda on Development Teams was interesting for the first half when he was talking about principles of building great teams and how to recognise them, but less so when he moved on to telling us how great Team System is, at length. Shocking moment for me - he asked the audience "Who's used continuous integration builds of some kind?"; the entire Intergen contingent put their hands up... and about 2-3 other people. In a crowd of probably more than 300. I can't imagine working without my CCTray... what are people doing?
• Andrew Peters on .NET Languages took us on a quick romp through static, dynamic and functional languages in the .NET platform. Andrew covered a lot of ground in a hour and kept it interesting with lots of demos. He finished with a challenge to go learn a dynamic language - that's been on the I-really-should-get-around-to-that-sometime list for quite a while, must do that. Python or Ruby anyone??

Overall, TechEd has been great. While some sessions have been decidedly uninspiring, they're in the minority and I've been able to hear a lot of good stuff on a huge variety of topics. I have been reminded again and again of two things in particular:

1. As I've mentioned previously, how passionate I used to be about User Experience design, and how much I should be again.
   
2. How much knowledge we have at Intergen that we take for granted but that a fair proportion of the industry doesn't seem to have picked up on yet e.g. continuous integration builds, test driven design, the MVP pattern... Our management often say we're ahead of the game, TechEd has served to prove to me that it's true.
   

If you get a chance to go to a TechEd anywhere - go. :)