Im at a leaving do and talking to old colleges, they are full of how bad a migration from notes x to notes 8 is going, and how the users are complaining and people higher up are talking about the “Ex*****e” word

Now IT people bitch all the time (i do it my self) but this did indeed sound very bad (20+ server crashes a week and 1000+ helpdesk calls), Id like to help, Id like to tell someone at Lotus so they can try and step in and offer assistance to prevent the evil outlook taking control, but quite frankly IBM already know (they were part of the initial migration), and I’ve seen this sort of thing happen so often that now i just give another shrug and think “another notes site lost”.

a pity, a pity 🙁

Well, i cant believe the last few days, they have been great from start to finished, from the perfect setting, to the company, to the content, all has been top notch. if you did not make it, TRY HARDER NEXT TIME!!. Everywhere i looked there were people to talk to, things to learn, Questions being answered, Vodka being drunk.

High points (Personal)

Maureen Leland’s session on domino designer, to get such straight answers from a person in the know was a breath of fresh air, and made us all very confident that the future is in good hands (can we all say domino Designer as plug in to Eclipse).

Mary Beth Raven coming up and getting my better half’s name right (i bet there’s no random .Net developer/bloger who can say the same of the head of Visual Studio design).

Opening a package to discover that all speakers had a little Lego model of them selves (happy grin).

Ben and My Session went ok, but should have gone better, will have to try harder next time, grrrrrr, giving out caffeine as your presentation gift is definitely the way to go

Bob P firmly re-confirmed him self as not only a “man of the community” (sound of stickfight being sick) but also as a real person not a fake corporate suit, i realise that sounds sickafantic, but tough, ive only encountered a few good high level managers and anyone who will demand the straight deal off Bill Buchan (a man not known for his shy and retiring nature) at 1am is not your normal corporate drone.

The conference its self felt like the “totally deniable lotusphere”, a place where you could say the things that we officially wrong but practically right.

There were traumatic moments, such as when a senior IBM person pointed at me and said “so YOUR stickfight!!!”, making me nearly dive out the back window.

Finally and most importantly a massive and grovelling thank you to Warren, Kitty, the sponsors and organisers, it reminds me of a chilli i ate this week “good shit, well made”,

Well that’s it, i think, im off to book my lotusSphere hotel before the spell wears off and i lose my unreasonable belief that lotus is going to turn it all around and we are gona be great again.

RAD – The official name for domino development

RABID – Domino development with a insanely demanding project manager and when devs have designer access to live

RANCID – When you have to fix/update databases that MS Access level programmers have written to make their CV look better i.e “i wrote a custom HR solution”

REWARDING – Then you can produce a great solution using domino in half the time it would take using something else, PARTICULARLY if some daft a**e is playing silly political B***ox and saying domino is ‘legacy’

RED-EYE – when a project manager sells a RABID solution as RAD and you have one night to save the world (or Domino’s name is mud)

REALISTIC – When domino developers start writing in JAVA,Flex,Hibernate on Jboss to keep their jobs.

Been watching all the “sticking with notes”/”moving on” talk on all the blogs, and only just realised that i was one of the offenders, the reason why i only just realised is not simply because im dumber than a sack of bricks, its because i have taken the domino 8.5 splash screen to heart, it says “built on eclipse”, just as the flex splash screen says “built on eclipse”, and the myeclipse screen (well duh!)

When you realise that, the reason for conflict just seems to melt away, your an eclipse developer, Domino is suddenly a back end and a UI interface, just as flex is, and hibernate, etc etc, you may have a STRONG preference for one toolset, but your core is eclipse (providing you are on a modern version of notes), so we can just write amazing apps, why make life complex (shrug).

Now that the London Developer Co-op has been up for a few months, I cant believe that i did not try and get into something like it before, admittedly its got big guns like Matt White , Ben Poole in it so I’m at the bottom of the heap, but to be able to point to a “support crew” and have proper branding and such when you are surprised with the chance of a big job or a posh client for whom you being a “single contractor” will just not cut the mustard, is amazing, you attract attention from areas you would not have had access to before, also you meet people like Andrew Magerman who is trying to do the same thing with http://www.notesnet.ch in Switzerland (pop over to see them), hopefully we can do some work together.

All in all, well worth the effort.