Developer Day Boulder Wrapup

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these developers from the swift completion of their appointed conference. As it so happened, we experienced two of those obstacles at Developer Day Boulder this past weekend – Boulder got its first snowfall of the year the night before, and the TechStars bunker got extremely warm as the day progressed (in seeming defiance of the sub-freezing temperatures outside).

We had great attendance despite the difficult conditions, and those who made it enjoyed the event a great deal. Chad Fowler started us off with a discussion of creating a remarkable life, and (judging from the tweets I saw fly by) inspired a number of the listeners to take more control of their experiences.

Chris Perkins followed Chad, and gave us a thorough introduction to TurboGears and the state of the Python web community. From there, we moved on to Rob Sanheim's talk about the cloud, and I saw my first ever live-deploy (live-coding is so last year). Jeremy Hinegardner then closed out the morning session by discussing a number of tools that work well in mixed-language environments.

After lunch, we had a great series of lightning talks. David Eisinger premiered his Introduction to Ruby and Mid-90s Hip Hop for the public, Jason Turner showed off ChaiScript, Ben Reubenstein talked about donating time and talent to worthy causes, Bobby Wilson railed against the current state of templating systems in Ruby, Jess Martin describe the One True Way of CSS, and I talked a little bit about how the comics industry is difficult to model in a relational database.

The afternoon session then continued with David Eisinger, back up to explore email as an interface. Derek Chen-Becker was next up, with an introduction to Scala and a brief demo of Lift, the Scala web framework. We then shifted to the mobile and desktop worlds, with Bill Dudney and a talk about CoreAnimation. Finally, Bruce Eckel closed us out with his perspective of the evolution of features in C++, Java, and Python.

All in all, this was another successful Developer Day, and we're excited to start planning for 2010. If you'd like to see us come to your area and showcase the various developer communities, feel free to leave a comment here or email me at bscofield@developer-day.com. Viva la Developer Day!

* Note: We'll be posting the speakers' slides to their SpeakerRate pages and to the Developer Day Boulder page as we get them in.