Saturday was the 4th 'Developer Developer Developer' conference and it was an all round excellent day.  It was first time I've been to one on my own, which turned out to be a bonus as I actually made the effort to talk to some different people, so much so that I didn't make it to the grok talks which appeared to go down really well.  The other highlight of the day - for me at least, as it appears this was a repetition of what was said at DDD3 - was Ed Gibson's impromptu talk on security, the internet and our responsibility as developers to make our code safe and secure.  The stereotypical ex-FBI agent, certainly had a captive audience.

Of the five sessions I attended the ones by Joanna Carter, Sarah Blow and Helen Emerson stood out the most.  

I am going to talk about Joanna's session first as I don't want what I say to overshadow the other two speakers who were excellent.  There is no doubt about her technical knowledge and industry experience, but, to put it bluntly, Joanna Carter is possibly the most arrogant speaker I have listened to outside of university.  The only things I can remember from the session were the large number of references to how great Delphi is and a question from the audience about ASP.NET being dismissed because she only dealt with 'proper technology'.  She ended the session by extolling the virtues of wooden cameras over digital ones...

Anyway, enough of the bad points about the day, on to the good ones.  Helen's short and simple walkthrough about 'developing objects in JavaScript' evoked almost as many lightbulb moments as when I read Petzold.  This session would have put a lot of Atlas developers in good stead, certainly I now have a better understanding of how the object model in the Microsoft AJAX library works.

Despite the session being technically plagued (no Ethernet or wifi access for 3rd parties in a lecture room on the Microsoft Campus?  Go figure!) Sarah remained cool and the talk went very well.  There was a large amount of audience participation and it felt more like an informal discussion group than a lecture but she still managed to get through all of her material in the allotted time which was great.  In general terms I garnered a great insight into how blogs, podcasts, vlogs and RSS rivers can improve communication in business and came away with a number of ideas for both myself and for work.

Those that went remember to give your feedback and maybe win an MSDN subscription.