What happens when you get in a room with Dave, Don, Keith, Patrick, Peter, Simon, Tim and countless other web services pioneers in a SellsBrothers DevCon?  I don't know about everyone else, but I had a blast.  It was cool to see people dissing their own implementations, and sharing equal parts of war stories and success stories.

My favorite parts:

• When Keith and Don, both of whom quite obviously knew much about DIME in general and equally obviously knew very little about how DIME was actually implemented in the current incarnation of .NET undauntedly stepped through the debugger in realtime and learned along with the rest of us.
• Steve Loughran's pitch on "When Web Services Go Bad", particularly every point where he talked about why he moved from ASP to Java/Apache technologies.  His talk was full of practical, real world experience, and completely devoid of any hype or religion.
• Discussion with Don, Simon, and Keith over some of the issues raised in my To Infinity and Beyond essay.  It was clear that Don had never read it. 
• Peter and Simon's talk on integrating SOAP with Jabber.  Much coolness there.  Also the discussions with these two during the break about Manufactured Serendipity. 
• Pretty much any time Tim Ewald talked.  I didn't know him before, but found myself agreeing with 100% of everything he ever said.

I talked to Chris Sells about helping organize the next DevCon.  It would be nice to have [ehem!] a bit more representation from other SOAP Implementations.  Chris enthusiastically agreed.

  8:54:41 PM    

Suggestions for the WebLogs Top 100: it would be nice if the URL's were augmented with either the title of the page or the value of one or more of the links.  I still have a hard time recognizing my friends by their RUID's  0100655, 0101679, 0101101...

A citations/sources link (like daypop/blogdex) would be valuable too.

I also wish that there was some way that I could contribute more than simply providing ideas...

  2:39:42 PM