I spent yesterday at Architecture and Design World in Chicago, and led two talks – the first on Continuous Integration and the second on GOF Patterns. If you’ve not been to a conference organized by Dr. Dobbs Events group, I’d highly recommend one. For the past few years, I’ve been attending SD Expo, Architecture and Design World, and SD Best Practices, and repeatedly hear conference attendees remark on the quality of the events. A staple of these conferences is their avoidance of vendor specific talks, and emphasis on the latest and greatest techniques.

These conferences are a melting pot of ideas and individuals, and they offer excellent sessions for all. I spoke to developers using Ruby/Rails, Java, and .NET to develop enterprise web applications, software engineers developing embedded systems in C++, project managers interested in agile practices, and enterprise architects seeking to learn more about SOA. The range of sessions is fantastic. While one instructor is preaching the virtues of MDA, another is discussing Agile Modeling. The opinions and insight offered not only by the instructors, but the attendees, is invaluable to all those in attendance. There’s a lot of excellent discussion following the sessions, throughout the halls, and into the happy hour and BOF sessions. There really is something for everyone. If you haven’t had an opportunity to attend one of these events, I’d highly recommend it. Ask your peers who have been there, I’m sure they will too.

If you’re reading this, you’ve found the location of my new blog. I’ve just recently switched from Nucleus to Wordpress, and so far couldn’t be happier. The URL for the blog has changed to http://techdistrict.kirkk.com, so be sure to update your bookmarks and rss feed (http://techdistrict.kirkk.com/feed/). Here’s why I like Wordpress:

• Easier to modify the look & feel. I look forward to experimenting with plugins, and continuing to mess with the theme.
• Better captcha. I’m using the Challenge Captcha. Leave a comment, and you’ll see. No more sifting through what the spambots left, and approving the valid comments.
• Ability to Blog by e-mail, whereby I send an e-mail to a private personal account, and voila…it shows up as a blog entry.
• Easy, straightforward blog entry and admin panel. Just cleaner.
• Does a lot right “out of the box” such as pretty urls, and likely a whole lot more I don’t know about yet.

In the past, I’ve used PmWiki for a lot of content management, which is the technology behind my home page. As of now, that site isn’t going anywhere, and is where you’ll continue to find JarAnalyzer, AssAnalyzer, and other non-opinionated information related to my work.

Because I find WordPress easier to use, I’m hopeful this blog will be a bit more active. The Blog by e-mail feature is very nice, especially since most of my ideas come to me at odd times, and it’ll be easy to shoot an e-mail to the account I’ve setup for new blog entries, meaning I can do it on plane, train, automobile or anywhere else I don’t have a connection and simply leave it in my outbox till I’m back online.