When I entered the JAOO venue today I didn’t really know which track I wanted to follow. This problem was not caused by of lack of interesting topics, no, it was more the other way around. There were several tracks to which I could relate very easily, such as Business Drivers and Challenges or Developer Tools. However, today I chose to take on something, I’ve heard (read: gotten preached) a lot about, but hadn’t personally had any good primers on yet.

I therefore attended three sessions about REST. First it was Extending the Reach of your SOA with REST by Rachel Reinitz, then it was REST - Theory vs Practice by Subbu Allamaraju & Mike Amundsen and then How to Sell REST to Your Boss by Anne Thomas-Manes. The good thing about these sessions was that they were based on reason and real-life experience and weren’t just some fanatical half-religious hype-speak. And that was precisely what I was looking for.

Had a interesting lunch with Martin Klose from Dussefdorf, Germany, who is starting up a new business together with his brother. We talked far and wide, about doing “good”, proactive business and finding out what you like and are good at and doing it. It seems to be on the minds of many people today – is it maybe a subconscious reaction to the crisis and the things it brings? Hm. Anyways, I hope to hear more from this guy and his new business adventure.

[Update evening]

Even ended with meeting up with my old time friend from my computer science studies, Mark Walker, who lives in Århus. We went down town and ate a nice dinner and of course talked geek as much as possible. ;-)

After dinner I needed to grab something from the nearest 7-Eleven store. Right after doing so, we unfortunately got at glimpse af the darker side of things, as a drunk guy came up to us and started blurting out weird stuff. He was friendly at first, but at some point he just totally flipped over, and mumbled something more or less like “I can carve your guts out so easy, even without touching you”. Of course we were stunned by such a remark, and everything came to a standstill. I don’t want to get into details, but the situation was disarmed using diplomacy and no-one got hurt. But still, what a bummer…

[Update afternoon]

Some pictures from today…

Simon Peyton-Jones on the functional programming language Haskell.

Books books… want them all!

Rachel Reinitz from IBM on REST.

Subbu Allamaraju & Mike Amundsen on REST (on picture: Mike).