The content this year has been incredibly good, as an example yesterday afternoon we had two wonderful sessions.
Firstly Julian Robichaux and Rob McDonagh presented about reports, charts and graphs in Notes and Domino, this is stuff that you can use from the moment you get home, so you really owe it to yourself to get the slides and the sample database as soon as it’s released. Julian and Rob have a great presenting style, and really play off each other well.
And then an old dependable session by Rob Novak and Viktor Krantz, the Great Code Giveaway. This year was a real stormer which demo’d some Dojo Dijits that Viktor has spent the last couple of months writing. Again the code is ready for use in the real world, I can think of at least a couple of places I’ll be going home and using this next week. And it’s really this sort of content that makes Lotusphere worthwhile, seriously, these two sessions are worth the admission fee alone, there is no way I could get that code done in less time than the conference fee costs.
The bloggers BOF was as entertaining as ever. It’s hard to know how such a group of shy, retiring individuals manage to keep talking for an hour but somehow it was managed.
And then onto Islands of Adventure. This year there was a group of six of us doing the rounds with plenty of beers, a few rides and even a burger along the way. The park closed at 10:30 so we headed to Kimono’s, just for a change where there was more beer, no sake this time which can only be a good thing. Then and 2:00 Kimono’s closed so it was on to someone’s room for cocktails and Devin’s homebrew beer. Now Devin is a true geek but his beer is something to behold, I just drank that for the rest of the evening, absolutely stunning, thanks Spanky.
I gave up at about 4 I think, but apparently others carried on until later, but surprisingly this morning people didn’t seem to be in too bad a state.
No sessions this morning as I was in bed until Gurupalooza but it was worth getting out for with some good questions and a classic line from Bill. “These guys may bleed yellow but at the moment I am sweating whiskey”.
Beat the Developers followed. In both Gurupalooza and Beat the Developers there was a shout out for idea jam with big rounds of applause. This is about the coolest thing, for me, to have happened at Lotusphere. The number of IBM-ers who said that they are watching the site and actually taking the ideas to put into upcoming products is simply amazing.
The closing general session was, like previous years, superb. This year we got a TV chef which didn’t sound too promising but he was hugely funny and had the audience laughing hard for almost an hour. At the end the bloggers were kindly allowed onto the main stage again for photos, so expect to see them floating around the Flickr Lotusphere2008 tag group shortly.
I’ll do a full wrap up post shortly but for now, that is Lotusphere 2008 over with and it has been yet another classic. We can start counting the days until January 18th 2009.
