Java Posse Roundup '09 - The Conference is Personal Again

I've just attended day 0 of the Java Posse Roundup '09. I'd been told Open Spaces conferences felt like no other, but you need to experience it to really understand why. Here's a taster:

• We all (or at least a lot of us) met up at Camp 4 Coffee. We filled the place to overflowing. The town know's something's up with all the geeks milling around
  
• We got taken through a variety of Scala by Dick (Wall), Bill (Venners), Joel (Neely) and Diane (Marsh). When you got lost you could ask (this happened quite a lot with me). Then we worked on reverse engineering LINQ with Scala. We all contributed
• We hacked on JavaFX to build a cool lightning talk app led by Joe (Nuxoll) as the designer and Tor as the lead developer
  
• We had an introduction to Fan from Fred (Simon) who is a contributor
• We had supper round at Bruce (Eckel)'s. He's laid up with a broken leg, so we cooked for him, grilling beside a massive snow bank, and chatting about cultural differences between the US and Europe. Then I chatted to James (Ward) and we have a mutual aquaintance (Steve Webster, the architect and originator of the Cairngorm framework for FLEX)
  
• We finished up with a series of summary lightning talks from all the groups on what we'd done during the day
  
• We adjourned to our house, and met another attendee on the way, chatted, and listened to the Coyotes out in the woods

All in all, it just feels different. I still had the tired, brain-full feeling you get from Java ONE, but that was combined with the feeling that you're participating and building relationships which will help you get even more out of events to come (and beyond). I still haven't got involved in any projects yet, but I aim to change that today. Bill (Venners) is looking for input on the tests for ScalaTest and it looks as good a time as any to try and get to grips with that. Fred (Simon) is also making noises about a Netbeans plugin for Fan. That might be interesting too. We'll see how much I manage to pack in...

Anyway, off to Camp 4 and day 1...