Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Thanks to Burton Group for putting on a very good conference in San Francisco this week, and more kudos to Anne Thomas Manes for putting together a great day of talks on SOA on Thursday.

This conference really demonstrated how building a network can make these events far more useful. Besides this blog, I participate in a Yahoo group on SOA as well as some less active user communities. It never fails that a few fellow participants show up at these conferences and the hallway conversations are quite valuable. At Catalyst, I had the opportunity to meet with Anil John from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Shawn Furgason from Rockwell Collins, Ben Moreland from The Hartford, and Jeff Barr from Amazon, as well as some friends from the vendor community including Andrew Nash, Dave Hollander, and Miko Matsumura. I also met Brent Carlson from Logic Library for the first time.

All of you conference attendees that are practitioners, if your company policies allow it, I encourage you to get active and participate in the community! You can make your conference experiences even better by doing so.