ETech 2004: Wrapup

ETech is now behind us -- it's like Xmas in so many ways. You spend much time looking forward to it and then its over in a flash. Alas.

ETech was a blast and extremely valuable -- no question about it. There are so many facets of the conference that cannot be captured in a weblog entry; you have to be there to experience it. Tim Appnel already touched on this a little in his blog entry The End of Near. There are so many cool people having cool coversations that if you tried to capture some of these conversations in their entirety we'd be accused of name dropping and bragging.

I'll take that risk and try it anyway -- I'll just slightly obfuscate the personas involved:

Coming back from lunch on thursday I started chatting about the whole concept of the gift economy with a member of a vital international standards organization and the CTO of a prominent non-profit, when the inventor of a ground breaking business application butted in and proceeded to lecture us on the semantics of the term gift economy. He stongly advocates that people use a more suited term -- he took objection to term gift.

Where else but at ETech can you be rubbing elbows with the people who make high tech happen, only to be schooled by one of the legendary names in computer science??

This year's ETech presented the usual collection of stimulating keynote speeches, presentations, tutorials and panels. But one subtle thing about the conference was different -- the number of female attendees this time was greater than in previous years. The computer science field is chronically unbalanced when it comes to the sexes and the first few ETech conferences were no different. I'm not sure what caused the change, but I was delighted to see a healthier balance of the sexes. Unfortunately, it was still far from balanced, but the overall trend seems to be improving -- at least at ETech.

I had a blast in San Diego -- the hotel was a good venue for the conference, even if the hotel staff seemed befuddled at the attendees at times. (I observed a hotel staffer looking dumbstruck at one attendeee who was holding two open laptops in his hands and still wildly gesticulating as he spoke).

Thanks to Rael, Gina and the whole O'Reilly Conferences staff -- you all rock!

If you made it to ETech this year, what were your thoughts??