To summarize, some random observations:

• JAVA vs. .NET: from the .NET prespective, I noticed that the JAVA crowd is way ahead of us in terms of agile development processes, but is starting to lag behind technology wise (still doing massive Spring configurations and generics appeared almost absent);
• NoSQL: time will tell, but this could really change the way we think about structuring our data in the future. By far the session I attended that caused the most excitement in the crowd;
• When asked how many people in the audience use NHibernate, more than 50% raised their hands! (ok, it was a session about the NHibernate ecosystem);
• Entity Framework 4.0 really is going to be a big improvement;
• ASP.NET WebForms 4.0 has some improvements, but nothing that got me really excited. It feels like WebForms is finished (as in proven technology that isn’t going to change much anymore);
• Google returns totally different search results in Sweden

At one time during the discussion, Scott Hanselman brought up the issue that we (as in the people who attended the conference) might be out of touch with people like ‘The Chief Architect of the Nebraska Forestry Department’, formerly know as ‘Mort’. The discussion continued a little with terms like ‘elitist geeks’ and so on and during the discussion I started to get the feeling that Scott might have a point here. Aren’t we out of touch with the majority of developers that do the ‘real’ work?

Then, Ayende countered with a statement that he simply doesn’t trust developers who don’t keep up with technology, blogs and want to learn and made a perfect analogy: when you have to visit a doctor, do you trust one that doesn’t go to conferences and reads his literature to keep up to date?

That statement immediately did it for me. We aren’t out of touch at all. We are working in an industry where things change rapidly and I think it’s our obligation as professionals and towards our customers to continue to learn and improve ourselves. Maybe the people who don’t (want to) do this are the ones out of touch?

So you might think comparing a doctor with a software developer isn’t fair because the doctor is dealing with something much more important like the health of people and we developers just deal with computers and stuff? Think twice: our customers invest lots of money in software and for that amount of money they just expect us to stay current on technology.

Keep learning and improving!

(and call me an elitist geek if you like )