Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Instead of going in to work this morning, I headed over to the Georgia International Convention Center near the airport off of Camp Creek parkway. For a few weeks now there have been advertisements in the lobby and around the building about a ‘Developers Conference’ for all ‘developer’ family of employees within the organization. They have been making a pretty big deal about this and have been presenting the banners and advertisements with a comic-book style of artwork.

When I arrived around 7:45am, I got in line for registration. Because all of the people there were developers and managers, I recognized many people. In fact, Casey was next to me in the registration line.

While registering, they gave me a bag with paperwork including a brochure booklet that was presented much like a comic book. I also got a 32-meg flash memory keychain device for filling out a survey.

As soon as I got through registration I went into the main conference room for the 10am keynote speech. Casey, Brian, and Rodney saved a seat for me. The keynote speech was interesting.

First to speak was Mike Childress, a senior vice-president. He talked about the IT industry in general as well as shifting our focus more to ‘engineering’ style development instead of ‘hacking’ style development. In order to achieve this, we use a standard set of tools and methodologies.

After Mike spoke, the second speaker was Carey Stewart (director of Architecture). Carey did a role-playing thing describing an evil secret force that has been infiltrating our ranks. He unveiled this threat by pulling a giant sheet off of a large stage prop which was a gigantic robotic spider. The demonstration continued with a developer ‘firefighter’ to try to eliminate the bug with a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately it didn’t phase the spider. Next, a team of new firefighter developers armed with the new Windows XP suite of products used their high-tech tools to kill the spider. Instead of using a fire extinguisher, they used some sort of flash-bang device. There was a loud explosion and lots of light and confetti from the ceiling. I wonder who is footing the bill for all of this? Carey also talked about something very interesting. He said that for windows development we are going to be moving to .NET and C#. This was very interesting to hear because I sent him an email about 1.5 years ago asking if there was any plan to move to .NET and C#. At the time, his response was that we had no intentions of moving in that direction. I guess things change.

After the speeches, I headed over to the ‘book room’ where Borders set up some booths. For attending the conference, Developers get a free copy of ‘XML Programming Bible‘ as well a free book of our choice. I decided to get ‘.NET Patterns‘.

I walked around to some of the other rooms where different vendors had booths set up demonstrating their products. There wasn’t a whole lot new for me to learn at the conference.

Around 11am I went back to the office and worked for a couple of hours before going home. Craig planned on arriving today around 2pm so I wanted to be home before he got there.

When Craig finally showed up, we went to Fuddruckers and had a late lunch. We caught up over lunch and then went back to my place. I helped Craig unpack his car and get settled in. He brought his old computer that he’s going to be giving to his cousin Jeff. I helped him rebuild the OS and get it cleaned up. He also brought all 25 Harry Potter book 5 audio CD’s as well as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Around 7pm we left my apartment and headed out to the movie theater. We saw ‘Matrix: Reloaded‘. Unlike some of the reviews, I thought it was a good movie. I thought there was indeed some closure at the end. Some of the parts were pretty slow but I still liked it.

After the movie we stopped at the package store and bought some liquor. Craig got some of those Bacardi single-drink things and I got some vodka and Red Bull.

Back at my place we played Warlords 4 all night until around 4am before going to bed.