ApacheCon 2003, Day 1

One day down, and here's what happened:

• Ben and I arrived early at registration, giving us plenty of time to drink lots of the bad coffee that was available. For tomorrow, I intend to find some "real" coffee before the day begins.
• We sat through some introductory sessions which were sadly a little dull. But the time was not wasted, as it gave us an opportunity to reconfigure our netowrk setups for the potentially hostile environment presented by public WiFi at a technical conference.
• I sat through an overview of the Apache XML projects, which was pretty informative because about two years ago I stopped paying attention to Apache's XML stuff. Progress has certainly been made, and this was a great way to catch up on it.
• Next up was a pretty lame paper-bag lunch provided by Sun (sorry, I mean the "Java Community Process"). (Mental notes: find real food tomorrow and avoid cheap corporate sponsors. Don't buy Sun, buy IBM.)
• After lunch I went to the presentation on Geronimo, which was sure to include fireworks due to their troubles with the JBoss folks. Sadly there were no fireworks: the only thing the Geronimo people had to say was "no comment".
• Finally I attened a pair of presentations on Atom. I went into the skeptical, because I had my doubts about Atom in general and Atom-Authentication in particular. After the presentations I can see that Atom and Atom-Auth are "Good Things" for their specific objectives, and I just feel sorry for those who have taken it upon themselves to meet those objectives.
• At the reception, Ben and I grabbed a spot at a table which then rapidly filled up with the likes of Mark Pigrim, Sam Ruby, Rael Dornfest, and others I didn't recognize but who seemed to "belong" there more than I did (but I was there first, dammit). At one point someone asked Ben "are you an A-list blogger too?" To be honest, it was kinda fun to be among these geeks of fame, until the discussion devolved into rants against Dave Winer. At that point I basically took my leave and partook of the free (as in beer, not speech) beer being provided.

All in all, not a bad day. There's been a strange undertone of "Java rules, Perl sucks" at the conference so far, which seems very strange coming from Apache people. Hopefully that's just because this first day has been focused on Java, and as things progress into more technologies perhaps we can move beyond petty language-tribalism and just get excited about cool technology.