I meant to blog more often while here at ESUG. But I've been having loads of fun interacting with people, preparing my Cairo presentation, and writing code.

This is a cool conference. More people than I had expected. And some really neat demos and talks. And very upbeat. Highlights for me so far:

• Lukas Rengali's talk on implementing [ ] atomic transactions, entirely at the image level. It was very enlightening about the whole approach
• Extreme Validation again (that thing that's associated with SUnit but really is very cool in it's own right, and has about as much similarity with SUnit as Point has with Association).
• Bryce gave a great bits-n-bytes overview of the current Squeak VM performance issues.
• Damien gave a very candid overview of what happens when you use traits to redesign the stream heirarchy. No, it's not all rosy. There's goods and bads.
• Good talks about how complex, but indeed possible, interfacing with Java is.
• Many others...
• Bruce Badger is currently discussing Sport.

Last night was the innovation awards. There were some really neat applications shown. I was really impressed with every one. Some surprises that I hadn't heard much about earlier included Tim McKinnon's Itrex product (XP/Scrum tracking tool), as well as the Small Object Observatory (google it).