The second day of the conference was a complete reversal of the disaster the day before.  The keynote talk was by Jeremy Kemper of 37 Signals.  DHH introduced him and explained that he was one of the trusted people in charge of day to day Rails development now.  Jeremy wasn't exactly the most exciting speaker but the content was engaging enough that I enjoyed the talk.  He outlined the new features of Rails 2.1 and announced its release (which didn't really come as a shock to anyone.)  I have been reading about these features for a few weeks now but it was cool to see someone demonstrate them live.

The session crowding problem was completely solved.  They reorganized the conference space and made better use of the larger rooms.  I attended a session during every single timeslot yesterday and enjoyed them all immensely.  There was also a lot of extra space to set down you gear, etc. and they had setup additional projection screens midway back in the larger rooms for the people sitting in the way back.  I should also mention that they had powerstrips everywhere in the rows so if you wanted to bring your laptop you would have no issues there.  I personally did not bring my laptop but those that did were very happy about that aspect. 

In general I noticed less laptops and more people paying attention to the speakers.  That really improved the "vibe" of the conference for me personally.  I don't know why it affected me so much but its hard to get into the spirit of things when people are just sitting there typing Twitter messages to each other.  It seems weird to be experiencing the conference "virtually" when you are physically there! 

My attitude of the conference improved considerably from yesterday's feeling that I would probably not attend again.  Everybody seemed a lot more relaxed and focused on the conference which also improved the quality of interactions I had with other people.  Instead of bitching about the problems with the conference we were able to focus on interesting technical discussions.

The testing talks (one by Thought Works and one by the maintainer of Rspec) were both excellent.  I also forgot to mention the interesting BoF session the night before with the Radiant people.  I met Sean Cribbs and some of the other contributors to Radiant.  I also met several of the people who use Radiant.  In addition to learning more about how people use Radiant, I discovered that there continues to be a lot of similarities between the philosophies and long term goals of Radiant and those of Spree.

I met some interesting people during the meal periods.  In the hotel bar I met a guy that I had interviewed with for a Rails development position several months ago (before joining End Point.)  I also keep bumping into Craig McClanahan whom I know from my days at Apache.  He seems to be at the center of Sun's Ruby on Rails effort and talked very positively about the framework.  As the grandfather of one of the earlier web frameworks it was interesting to see him there with all of the young Turks leading the next generation of frameworks.

Another interesting topic that keeps coming up is DataMapper.  Apparently this is what the Merb people are using now instead of ActiveRecord.  A lot of random people that I talked with mentioned this as something they were impressed with and were interested in learning more about.  So if you were curious to know what the "buzz" was here at the conference, DataMapper is definitely one of those hot topics.

Late last night I ran into Obie Fernandez (author of The Rails Way) and his Hash Rocket team.  I complimented him on his book (which I will be finishing on the plane ride back tomorrow.)  People were trying to recruit us to play this strange nerd game called Werewolf.  At the time I was more interested in the cage fighting match on the TV in the bar (CBS of all channels.)  They were still playing the game when I left the bar and even though it was ridiculously late I decided to give it a try.  It was actually kind of interesting to see a group of programmers apply logic to situation where it was of questionable value.