I wanted to cover something that wasn't technical ... somethingthat I could relate to on a personal level. I've been feelinglike one of the Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures on display at the MIT Museum in Cambridge.

A few people in the technology scene, through a combination ofbrains, insight and being in the right place at the right time,have had a massive impact. Of this relatively rare bunch, asmaller percentage are also engaging and interesting speakers.

While attending the SD East conference this week, I've beentesting a collection of portable hardware to find out if it trulyis possible to travel and work effectively at a conference whileleaving my trusty laptop at home. My speedy G4 Powerbook is aslim wonder, but a PDA is even slimmer and lighter. The last timeI tried this experiment, there was still a long way to go beforeI'd consider it again.

Gravity, the three principles of thermodynamics, Moore's Law --these are all immutable characteristics of nature, right? Thefunny thing about Intel cofounder Gordon Moore's observation in1965 that processors doubled in speed every 18 months is that thesemiconductor industry now plans religiously according to thatcurve.

REST, or Representational State Transfer, is a term coined byUniversity of California, Irvine, academic Roy Fielding in hisdoctoral dissertation—and it's hot enough a topic these daysthat a gaggle of SD East 2002 attendees chose to spend a chunk oftheir evening debating what REST can and can't do. Scott Means,coauthor (with Elliotte Rusty Harold) of XML in a Nutshell(O'Reilly, 2001), had labeled the Birds of a Feather confab as adiscussion of REST as an alternative to SOAP, and when I walkedin, the discourse was already going strong. Many had a genuineinterest in learning what REST offered over SOAP and whether itwould make their lives as programmers easier. But Means, in hiszeal to wrap a not so-new-idea around new terminology, had a wayof confusing the issues.

I came to Boston early, not only to get acclimated to the timechange and to prepare for the grueling hours covering my first SDconference, but to spend some time with friends in Cambridge.After quick tour of their house, we set out for a brisk walkaround the neighborhood, passing by the homes of Yo-Yo Ma andLongfellow. Then we happened upon the American Repertory Theatreand popped in just in time to catch a lecture/demonstration ofthe way a play goes from script to stage, presented by DirectorDavid Wheeler and two actors. The key, Wheeler said, is inbringing out subtle behaviors in the actors to add nuance andmeaning to the script--an iterative process between the directorand actor. Clearly a master, Wheeler described how he applied thepatterns he'd learned from years of experience to solve theunique problems presented in each play.

Despite all the advances made in graphical user interfaces and model-savvy development tools, programming code still looks as if it had been spit out of an ASR33 teletype. That's one reason why University of British Columbia professor Gregor Kiczales, leader of the AspectJ programming language effort at PARC, recently broke away from the famed think tank and joined forces with Dr. Charles Simonyi, inventor of the first "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor.

Traver Gruen-Kennedy, vice president and chief evangelist ofCitrix Systems, an application server and portal softwareprovider, had just flown in from COMDEX Tuesday morning topresent SD East's midday keynote, "Building the VirtualWorkspace: Let the Office Come to You."

Sometimes, to do something right, you just need to be shown how.Take my Sunday trip to the House of Blues' brunch inHarvard Square. Audience members get more than the typical Sundaybrunch; they're also fed a steady diet of gospel music, and Ithink the experience may have taken some by surprise.

After a long day of conference sessions and expo floor crawling,what better than to sit down with some buddies, have a beer andplay cards? Well, I don't drink beer and I've never learned therules of anything more complex than gin rummy, but that didn'tstop me from joining the guys at one of three tables of playersin Tuesday night's Birds of a Feather gathering at SD East 2002in Boston. Extreme Programming playing cards are the latestaddition to Joshua Kerievsky's bag of tricks.

If attendance numbers are any indication, the economy is pickingup. Of course, that's just one of several reasons why theSoftware Development East 2002 conference, which kicked offMonday, November 18, in Boston, has seen a doubling of itspreregistered attendance numbers over last year.