I've never gone to a programming conference before. I am an avid coder and only attended small meet ups from time to time. Listening to talks and seeing what is on the minds of other coders, who is attending on what talks and the trends in the industry are interesting.
In order to stay relevant it's important to see where everyone is going and what people are up to. Common sense, especially in the coding world changes very quick. I've seen some impressive architectures developed by just teams of 10 people. The idea that you need a big dev team to accomplish something is changing. Small groups people people can and will out code large organisations.
Attending other programming conferences will be an interesting thing for me to do, I wonder if other people doing modern languages are thinking the same thing.
Of an interesting note, lots of people here are live tweeting during the conferences, some of the tweets are interesting. I've never been much of a twitter user, but following some of the stuff is kind of neat. Only curios about "inherent filtering" (i.e. the characteristics of people that tweet are different compared to those that don't).
Tomorrow is going to be a coding sprint, the first time I'll be attending one. Going to be interesting to see what can be developed in the time span of a single day...
Also.. I need a notebook with a better battery life. My 2008 macbook just dies too quick!
