Well, the user conference is over, and I slept in until 10:45 this morning recovering. A lot of fun, but some very long days, especially jet-lagged. A few highlights from my point of view

• George Bosworth gave a keynote talk on interesting aspects of Smalltalk that have influenced his thinking over the years. A good many war stories, illustrating particular points of interest. One that stuck in my mind was his discussion of Cargill. They were building a system to monitor the U.S. corn harvest in real-time. They were building on beta products, and in general doing some things that George thought at the time were remarkably risky. Then he realized that risk was their business, and risk management permeated everything they did. If the beta software worked out and was ready in time, they were prepared to capitalize on the upside. If it wasn't, they had fallback positions to protect themselves from the downside. Risk was to be managed, not to be eliminated. It's interesting in itself, but it also has echoes of the static typing/formalism school versus dynamic typing debates. The former argue that it's always preferable to be able to prove the absence of risk, without counting the cost. The latter argue that you want fallbacks ("safe" languages, where errors don't corrupt memory, exception handling, etc) and manage the risk. This theme re-emerged at the end of the talk, where he talked about how requiring perfection leads to disaster. Mistakes are to be encouraged and learned from, and Smalltalk encourages the latter. There was a lot of other interesting stuff. Jim Robertson is supposed to be making most of the sessions into audio podcasts, and this is one I'd definitely recommend.
• Niall Ross talked about "Changing the engine while the garage is moving", about porting between VW3 and VW7 while under very active development. This was particularly interesting for me because he's using StoreForGlorp to exchange code between the versions via a Store repository, on a serious production scale.
• Heinz-Ulrich Roggenkemper, from the Business Process Renovation group at SAP talked about their goals, views on innovation, how they've recently started to use Smalltalk for prototyping, how it got started, and the building of the SAP Netweaver Connect for VisualWorks. Well, the last item was mostly others.
• There were a number of very interesting customer stories. From DB-Systems we heard about the RUT-K system, which is used to plan the schedules for all of the German train systems. Uwe Liebold from AMD talked about their use of Smalltalk to control silicon fabs. Andre Schnoor of Cognitone gave a very interesting demo on some very sophisticated music software his company is building.
• Customer feedback. We had a panel for customer feedback, along of course with the more informal feedback through the conference. One thing that struck me was the calmness of it. There was no one yelling at us. It didn't turn into a therapy session for people upset that the Smalltalk market hadn't recaptured the glory days of the early 90's. There were lots of things people were asking about and suggesting, but I've been in a number of such forums that were pretty unpleasant experiences, including a few where I was one of the ones up at the front. Perhaps it means we've actually got relatively happy (or not desperately unhappy) users. On the other hand, perhaps they've just given up on yelling at us :)
  

I've skipped over a lot, including all the Cincom presentations. For full details, Jim Robertson has blogged all of them, and will be making the audio available before too long. Oh, and in one of my two talks I gave the first public presentation of some things we're looking at in terms of projects and streams for configuration management in Store. Hopefully you'll be seeing more on that before too long, although it's still very early stages work.

And now to bed. I wandered around and did some shopping today, and tomorrow I'm off to Eintracht Frankfurt before heading home Sunday.